Excavating the Remains of Empire: War and Postimperial Trauma in the Twentieth-Century Novel

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Excavating the remains of empire: War and postimperial trauma in the twentieth-century novel

Elizabeth J. Andersen University of New Hampshire, Durham

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Recommended Citation Andersen, Elizabeth J., "Excavating the remains of empire: War and postimperial trauma in the twentieth- century novel" (2002). Doctoral Dissertations. 87. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/87

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. EXCAVATING THE REMAINS OF EMPIRE: WAR AND POSTIMPERIAL TRAUMA IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVEL

ELIZABETH ANDERSEN

A.B. Bowdoin College, 1990

M.A. University of New Hampshire, 1995

DISSERTATION

Submitted to the University of New Hampshire

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English

September, 2002

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c 2002

Elizabeth Andersen

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-- yAcfip Dissertation Di or, Sandhya Shetty^r Associate Professor of English

Jao« E. Aikins, Professor of English

Elizabeth Jane Bellamy Professor of English

Robin M. Hackett, Assistant Professor of English

Mary E. Rhiel, Associate Professor of German

o r Dati

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... v

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION...... 1

II. “KNITTING TOGETHER EVERYTHING & ENDING ON THREE NOTES”: 2 BECOMES 3 IN VIRGINIA WOOLFS MRS DALLOWAY...... 53

III. EMPIRE, REVISED IN PAT BARKER’S REGENERATION TRILOGY...... 100

Empire, Revised ...... 108

Empire, Abroad...... 130

Empire at Home ...... 150

IV. “THE GREAT ADVENTURE INTO NOWHERE”: POSTIMPERIAL TRAUMA AND THE NEW PASSAGE EAST IN MARGARET DRABBLE’S THE GATES OF IVORY...... 167

Trauma...... 177

Women...... 205

Literature...... 215

V. “THE THEATRE OF WAR” VS. “MEMORIES OF RIOTS” IN TWO NOVELS BY AMITAV GHOSH...... 236

VI. CONCLUSION...... 290

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 305

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

EXCAVATING THE REMAINS OF EMPIRE: WAR AND POSTIMPERIAL TRAUMA IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVEL

Elizabeth Andersen

University of New Hampshire, September, 2002

In “’’Excavating the Remains of Empire: War and Postimperial Trauma in the

Twentieth-Century Novel,” I investigate the implications of the residual presence of

empire in the contemporary novel set in England, by questioning that if it is generally

accepted that in the age of imperialism novels co-produced empire, what do they now, in

this historical moment of the late twentieth-century, produce in its stead? Do shame and

nostalgia for empire and the trauma of empire’s dissolution coexist in the postimperial,

postwar novel? I use war as the key point of entry into the empire and novel connection,

and claim that war operates in the novel on three essential fronts: as resulting from and

encoding imperial tensions, as the traumatic event which magnifies empire’s dissolution,

and as the only acceptable model for a nation in crisis. Because war both results from

and encodes imperial tensions, and novels are so often the battleground on which these

imperial tensions wrestle for signification and reformulation, then war in novels can serve

as the double lens which magnifies the residual workings of empire and the novel. I

begin with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalbway, and claim that in it she reveals the

limitations of the binaries of war and empire, while also portraying the anxieties

regarding empire that have been raised by the First World War; I show how Pat Barker’s

Regeneration trilogy incorporates these two aspects as well, yet also furthers the

connection between war and empire by using war to work out the traumas caused by

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. empire’s loss; I claim that Margaret Drabble has a similar project in The Gates o f Ivory,

in which she too explicates this traumatic loss of cultural identity resulting from the end

of empire; and then I proceed to an examination of how Amitav Ghosh shows the

restrictions of war as the narrative of a nation in The Shadow Lines, while also proving

war to itself be a significant means of empire’s perpetuation. Despite the fact that the

British Empire has been officially dismantled, imperialism and the novel are still inter

connected.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

When the sun at long last began to set on the British Empire, it also left dark

certain key connections between empire and the novel. In the following study, I

investigate the implications of this residual presence of empire in the twentieth-century

novel set in England. The significance of empire to the nineteenth-century novel has

been thoroughly researched and analyzed, with studies such as Edward Said’s

Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism leading the way; Said’s reading of Jane

Austen’sMansfield Park, for example, in which he establishes how Austen

“synchronizes domestic with international authority,” shows how the pervasive, if

understated, imperialist references in the nineteenth-century novel are crucial to the

creation and depiction of a seemingly provincial England (87). If it is generally accepted

that in the age of imperialism novels co-produced empire, what do they now, in the

historical moment of the late twentieth-century, produce in its stead? Do shame and

nostalgia for empire and the trauma of empire’s dissolution coexist in the postimperial,

postwar novel? To answer these questions, I examine the function and representation of

the critical nexus of war and empire in a selection of novels set in England in the period

extending from the First World War to the mid-nineties.

War is my key point of entry into the empire and novel connection. To examine

war is really to examine empire, and even—or especially—in British novels, the two

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. World Wars, which are often parochially seen as Euro-American events, become

symptoms of a larger crisis—that of empire and imperial consciousness. As such a

symptom, war operates in the novel on three fronts. First, although war can exist without

empire, empire cannot exist without war. War is the primary tool of empire in both overt

and covert ways: the threat of war is used abroad to retain allegiance and the cult of war

is used at home to retain support. As the British Empire cemented its strength in the

second half of the nineteenth century, so “the army and its personnel rose in the public’s

esteem” (Mackenzie 5). Britain’s military image and its imperial image became

inseparable: each nourished the other. The popularity of the “military hero developed

out of the Indian Mutiny.... The language of war entered into hymns, tracts, and

sermons.... The public schools became wholehearted exponents of the new militarism,

closely intertwining it with patriotic and imperialist endeavor” (Mackenzie 5-6). War

became an intricate part of the image of empire, yet it was also a crucial means of its

power and control. Pat Barker identifies this in The Ghost Road, when she has her

character, W. H. R. Rivers, point out the irony involved when the British forbid the

Melanesian headhunters to hunt heads, so to speak (185). Rivers notes dryly that the

headhunters he lived with were “a people perishing from the absence of war” (207);

Barker then explicitly juxtaposes this observation with a journal entry from the British

soldier, Billy Prior, who is fighting in the Great War at the front in France, in which we

see people perishing from the presence of war. The paradox of empire was that it was

forcing some men not to fight, while simultaneously forcing other men to do just that In

one of these journal entries, Billy writes of how “Only the names meant anything. Mons,

Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres.... But now...1 realize there’s another group of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. words that still mean something, little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us,

them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power” (G 257). These are the words

of empire too, as we shall see, and Barker’s characters repeatedly realize how much,

beyond words, war and empire have in common. The honors of one bleed into the

horrors of the other. Because of this interconnectedness, then, when war surfaces in the

twentieth-century novel, empire is sure to follow.

The second “front” of war in the twentieth-century novel is as a traumatic event

which makes clear that empire’s dissolution is imminent. Because trauma Mis an

experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs” (Caruth 5), and because the response

to trauma is thus a delayed response, I posit the sudden popularity of World War I as a

topic in British novels written in the eighties and nineties as a belated processing of the

moment that would force a drastic change to the British cultural image. As Said claims

in Culture and Imperialism: “Imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a

degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with

the other” (71). If we agree with Said, then, that novels have had a role in producing

empire, it is logical that novels will now have a role in producing—or coping with—its

absence. As turning points for empire, therefore, the two world wars often become the

locus for this approach to managing and synthesizing Britain’s lost imperial identity.

The role war plays in the theater of imperialism does not end with empire,

however, and this is where the third front of war enters the scene. Nationalism is always

quick to take imperialism’s place by tapping into the popular sentiment surrounding war,

for one, so even though the times are postimperial, we are never left for long without

hearing war propaganda. But war also maintains a kind of imperial presence by

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dominating as the only acceptable model for a nation in crisis. In his novel, The Shadow

Lines, for example, Amitav Ghosh demonstrates how war becomes the only means of

telling the story of a nation; when other significant types of violence occur—such as

riots—they have no place in the national narrative, because such a national narrative is

based on imperial norms. In this way, war still functions as an extension of empire, long

after empire itself has crumbled; war is empire’s coliseum-sized remains. Therefore,

because war both results from and encodes imperial tensions, and novels are so often the

battleground on which these imperial tensions wrestle for signification and reformulation,

then war in novels can serve as the double lens which magnifies the residual workings of

empire and the novel.

The First World War has long been implicated as playing a role in the demise of

the British Empire. To begin with, this war is often seen as signifying the end of an era.

In The Great War and Modem Memory, Paul Fussell claims that the Great War “reversed

the Idea of Progress” (8), and as such ruptured not only a way of life, but an entire mode

of thinking. The war interrupted a patriotic innocence and thus became a point that

demarcated before—which was all good and reason and security and order—from after,

which was chaos and insecurity. Fussell points out how even the weather aligned with

such a theory: “all agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It

was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral.... For the modem imagination that last

summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but

irrecoverably lost” (23-4). Fussell further emphasizes the war as an ending by writing

that “Furthermore, the Great War was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place

within a seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time running from

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. past through present to future” (21). What is significant about this quotation, however, is

that Fussell fails to acknowledge or identify this “stream of time” as the linear progress of

imperialism, and that what the Great War was disrupting, in particular, was the image of

the strength and continuum of the British Empire. I argue that it is the innocence

surrounding the perception of the British Empire that is lost after World War I; it became

impossible, after the war, to miss the beginning dissolutions of empire.

Other critics and historians have not hesitated to make the connection between

World War I and the beginnings of the end of the British Empire. Claire Tylee, for

example, takes this same notion of a pre-war/post-war divide and unites it to the image of

empire. She writes that the “myth” of pre-war innocence “has combined with an idea of

Britain’s lost imperial splendour to support the current imagery by which the Great War

was viewed over and over in diaries and memoirs: that the War was like the Flood, the

Deluge, the Fall from Grace, and the world which was lost was Paradise” (245). James

Joll suggests that the situation was more complicated than this, and that doubts about the

empire were beginning to surface before the war. He explains that “For Britain, the

euphoria produced by the great imperial pageant in London at the time of Queen

Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was giving place to doubts...about Britain’s ability

to maintain her place as the strongest imperial power in the face of other challenges”

(177). Such doubts did not concern whether the empireshould continue its current

trajectory, but whether itcould. And significantly, Joll claims that this doubt first

surfaced as a result of a wan the South African or Boer war. This war “brought home to

many people the cost of empire in a way no earlier colonial campaigns had done” (Joll

177). The Great War would further erode imperial sentiment InPropaganda and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Empire John M. Mackenzie also avers that what one war started, the other war continued:

“Some have seen the Boer War as cracking the imperial spirit More conventionally, the

Great War has been regarded as the critical turning point The war, it is alleged, was

followed by a period of pacifism, and militarism and imperialism were so intertwined in

the late Victorian and Edwardian periods that revulsion from the one led to rejection of

the other” (Mackenzie 9). Of course, the war itself was in part a war fought over the

threat made to Britain’s imperial status: “It was because the German challenge to

Britain’s imperial position was a general one rather than a specific set of territorial

demands that it seemed so dangerous” (Joll 181). And the war did destroy empires, as

well as the sentiment felt toward empires. A. J. P. Taylor observes that,

Before the war there had been four empires in Europe; after it, there was none. The Habsburg Monarchy broke up into national states; the core of the Ottoman Empire emerged as national Turkey; Russia and Germany survived somewhat diminished, but not Empires at any rate in name. The King of England was the only remaining Emperor in the world, in his capacity as Emperor of India; even that title had only another generation to run. (284)

Postwar, the British were right to feel that their empire was beleaguered. The First

World War was in reality both the beginning of the end of empire and the unignorable

signal that its dissolution was imminent. Regardless of how sunny and pastoral and

halcyon the summers to come might be, the war made the British anxious over their now

obviously troubled empire.

One of the characteristics of war that corresponds with the legacies of empire is

the language that comes with it: war thrives on, produces, and is produced by the simple

binary. For example, as Paul Fussell explains, the soldiers were forced to learn that “one

thing [was] opposed to another, not with some Hegelian hope of synthesis involving a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dissolution of both extremes...but with a sense that one of the poles embodies so wicked

a deficiency or flaw of perversion that its total submission is called for” (79). The

Germans were evil—they were “them”; everything about them was “other”. As one

soldier said, “On this side of our wire everything is familiar and every man is a friend,

over there, beyond the wire, is the unknown, the uncanny” (Gilbert and Gubar 267). War

seems inseparable from these binaries. There is us and them, winning and losing, good

and evil. This language of simple dichotomy is a tool of war that is shared with empire,

which also has an us/them binary as its base. This, of course, is not a new idea. In

Orientalism, Edward Said established just how dependent the West is on its depiction of

the East as its opposite. He writes that “European culture gained in strength and identity

by setting itself off against the Orient” (3), and “the Orient has helped to define Europe

(or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1-2). The binary is

a central component of the power/knowledge connection that orientalism uncovers, and

empire, fueled by orientalism, is itself dependent on such binaries. War—as the overt

handiwork of empire—can further expose how the binary distorts as it simplifies. The

effects of imposed binaries are frequently a central concern in novels that scrutinize

empire’s outcome.

The representation of the two World Wars in novels can also clarify an approach

to the remains of empire from another significant angle: both wars disrupted the

propaganda image of the British Empire as it was previously perpetuated by events of

overtly imperial violence, such as the 1857 Mutiny in India. In Colonial Power, Colonial

Texts, M. Keith Booker shows how this Mutiny became a favorite subject for novels in

the late nineteenth century. Because of the violent role the British played in the Mutiny,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. one would think this imperial event would have been downplayed. Yet instead, as

Booker contends, “the Mutiny triggered an explosion of imperial discourse. The British

got as much mileage as possible from their successful suppression of the Mutiny by

making it central to their imaginary construction of the Raj and thereby using it as a

crucial prop to the prestige of the British government both in India and at home” (104).

As would happen again with World War I, numerous and gory rumors began to circulate

which exaggerated and created the horrors done to the British during the Mutiny. The

Mutiny thus became “enshrined at the center of the ritual of British power in India” and

“took on a prominence in late-nineteenth-century British literature that was out of all

proportion to its real historical significance” (Booker 104-5). Novels written with the

Mutiny as their focus expanded and elaborated upon these rumors and “transformed the

fictitious stories of rape and mutilation into factual evidence” (Sharpe 85). The different

facets of the Mutiny were twisted and re-played until they came to represent in the British

popular imagination the British Empire at its “best” These Mutiny fictions were so

popular because they reversed the colonizer/colonized roles in such a way that alleviated

any residual feelings of imperialist guilt. As Patrick Brantlinger points out in his chapter

on Mutiny fiction, “the imperialist dominators become victims and the dominated,

villains. Imagining the Mutiny in this way totally displaced guilt and projected repressed,

sadistic impulses onto demonicized Indian characters” (222).

The Mutiny not only continuously reappeared in the popular literature of the

times, but it also reappeared as an influence in imperialist decision-making. The Mutiny

enabled Queen Victoria to dispense with pretense and issue in her Queen’s Proclamation

of November 1858 that India was now Britain’s Indian Empire; the “English women’s

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ravaged bodies”—elaborated upon in Mutiny fiction— “ushered in a new imperial

authority” (Sharpe 81). Over sixty-one years later, the Mutiny was still being used as an

excuse for imperialist cruelty; in herAllegories of Empire, Jenny Sharpe shows how

officials tried to excuse the British massacre of unarmed civilians and children at

Jallianwala Bagh on April 13,1919, by using the events of the Mutiny as a defense (114).

The Mutiny had become an imperialist rallying myth; swaddled in the rumors established

as fact by Mutiny fiction, the Mutiny became a safe symbol to use to justify all sorts of

imperial events.

Even E. M. Forster, a man well aware of the problems of empire and not

necessarily a proponent of it, used the resonances of the Mutiny, instead of more

contemporary events, in his twentieth-century novel, A Passage To India. Forster began

to write A Passage to India before World War I, and then had trouble with it and set it

aside for several years. During this break from the novel, Forster received a letter from

his friend, Malcolm Darling, a colonial administrator in England, which described the

events at Jallianwala Bagh in great detail. This massacre troubled Forster and many have

speculated that when he returned to his novel, it was changed because of it: “the war and

the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 were decisive steps in his experience, so that when he

resumed his pre-war Indian novel, it became a different and darker affair, also a more

complex and powerful one, than as originally conceived” (Forster’s Letters x). It is

curious that in the many published volumes of Forster’s correspondence, although he

discusses India and Britain’s presence there continually, he does not mention Jallianwala

Bagh directly; and in A Passage—supposedly so influenced by Jallianwala Bagh—there

are only allusions to it, yet there are several direct references to the Mutiny.1

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. By substituting the Mutiny for the more pertinent—to his topic and times—and

disturbing Jallianwala Bagh calamity, Forster becomes the forerunner for yet another

characteristic of the imperial and postimperial novel: performing a kind of imperialist

metonymy that is the equivalent of the sidelong glance. Perhaps out of feelings of guilt

and trauma, Forster evades the direct implications of Jallianwala Bagh and instead will

try to explicate them using the Mutiny as a more comfortable trope. In “Narrative

Witnessing as Memory Work,” Irene Kacandes reminds us that “literary texts can be

about trauma.... But texts can also ‘perform’ trauma, in the sense that they can ‘fail’ to

tell the story, by eliding, repeating, and fragmenting components of the story” (56).

Forster does not want to look directly at the most troubling aspects of empire; what his

novel fails to reveal is indicative of such a shifting in gaze. Sixty years later, empire will

still cause British novelists to perform such a shift: inThe Gates o f Ivory, Margaret

Drabble will choose to write about empire and its effects in the late eighties and early

nineties—yet instead of concentrating on one of England’s former colonies, she focuses

on Cambodia, a nation ravaged by France and other European and American powers.

The British Empire’s absence in Drabble’s novel is similar to the absence of Jallianwala

Bagh in Forster’s.

In Mrs Dalloway—n novel also written soon after the Jallianwala Bagh

event—Woolf, too, refers to the Mutiny instead: regarding Clarissa’s old aunt, Helena

Parry, Woolf writes that “For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes.. .slowly

deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings—she had no tender memories, no

proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and

mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ‘sixties over solitary

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. peaks” (271); Helena Parry is, interestingly, “an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if

disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep

meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the ‘sixties in India” (271).

The Mutiny does not disturb her, perhaps because it was made into successful

propaganda; the war, on the other hand, can interrupt her reverie. In the twentieth

century, novelists were still referring to the Mutiny—instead of more current imperial

events —since it was yet a “safe” code event synonymous with the propaganda version of

the British presence in India.

When World War I began, it appeared initially as if it might serve as a modem

version of the Mutiny and function similarly in literature. And at first this seemed to

work: the war was going to-be another event that reinforced the image of the British

Empire, a moment around which could coalesce the motivating feelings of nationalism

and patriotism. The initial literature written about the war—such as Rupert Brooke’s

famous “If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there’s some comer of a foreign

field/ That is for ever England” sonnet—did act as an extension of Mutiny propaganda.

War literature was to serve as a kind of cultural self-representation in the same way as

Mutiny literature did. It was retro in functionand in style; in The Ruling Passion,

Christopher Lane points out how the war poets, for example, were (and still are) popular

in that they allowed the reader to escape the contemporary issues confronting them in

modernist works. Lane suggests that the war poets’ popularity had jingoistic origins and

that such impulses “may explain why the war poets remain so enduringly popular, and

why their aesthetic seems central to Britain’s disavowal of its imperial dissolution and

economic turbulence at the war’s end” (196). Paul Fussell has written extensively on

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. how “literary” the Great War was; often faced with an abundance of free time, the British

soldiers read the English “classics” and anthologies such as the Oxford Book o f English

Verse (159). Such literature reinforced national cultural boundaries by reminding the

soldiers of the cultural self-representation which needed to be preserved, and for which

they were fighting.

It is not surprising that the British soldiers of World War I turned to “classic"

English texts, for when the war lasted much longer than had originally been predicted,

and when the horrors of trench warfare in particular became known, using a

propagandists image of war in literature to mask the dissolution of empire become a

much more complicated enterprise. Patriotic poems such as Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets

began to be replaced by poems critical of the war, such as those written by Wilfred Owen

and Siegfried Sassoon. Patriotism was now questioned rather than celebrated: for

example, in Sassoon’s poem, “Lamentations,” when a soldier breaks down upon hearing

of his brother’s death, the narrator dryly and sarcastically proclaims that “In my belief /

Such men have lost all patriotic feeling” (131); and in “Base Details,” Sassoon writes

regarding the upper strata of the military, and in the voice of a Major, that, “And when

the war is done and youth stone dead, / I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed” (131).

This is not the nationalist and imperialist propaganda put forth in accounts of the Mutiny.

In her trilogy, Pat Barker zeroes in on this disjunction originating with the Great War.

She begins Regeneration with the anti-war proclamation written by the real-life Sassoon,

in which he states that “I am not protesting the conduct of the war, but against the

political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed” (3); she

then dwells on the paradoxes within Sassoon (and others), focusing on just how Sassoon

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. could be a “tremendously successfulbloodthirsty and platoon commander, and yet at the

same time, back in billets, out comes the notebook. Another anti-war poem”(Eye in the

Door 156). In this twentieth-century war, ruptures were forming which tended to reveal

the real state of the British Empire; so immediately after World War I, for example, E. M.

Forster could write a novel about British India which used the threat of a small colonial

mutiny to convey “a sense of historical crisis that is related specifically to the historical

experience of World War I” (Booker 3), and on the other hand, Virginia Woolf could

have war and empire surface repeatedly in her everyday London of Mrs Dalloway. As

with the later war poetry, war in these novels does not proselytize in the old way; rather,

it becomes a flare which spotlights the dissolution of the British Empire and the ensuing

apprehensions surrounding its demise.

It is important to note how historians continually refer to the feelings experienced

by the British after the Great War as “anxieties”. For instance, James Joll writes that “the

sense of British superiority which the existence of the Empire had helped to create over

many generations was...accompanied by an anxiety that the British were losing the

martial and administrative gifts which had won the Empire on which it was

believed...Britain's prosperity depended” (my italics) (Joll 179). That the British were

“anxious” over the state of their Empire after the war is understandable. What is

significant, however, is that such anxiety resurfaces in the eighties, a good forty years

past the official end of empire, and seventy years past the insight occasioned by the war.

In the eighties, cultural critics, literary critics, authors, and other writers joined the

historians in using tropes of malaise, ennui, and general illness surrounding issues of

the—now defunct—empire. For example, writing about the return of the British Raj in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. these times, Salman Rushdie, in his essay “Outside the Whale,” declares that “the

refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is under way,” that many British “turn

their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence” and that “Britain is in danger

of entering a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and to

posture like a great power while, in fact, its power diminishes every year” (my italics)

(91-2). In a similar fashion, Simon Gikandi asks in his Maps o f Englishness: “And how

are we to make use of a past whose practical and theoretical consequences were often

negative and destructive—a past that casts such a long shadow over our present moment

that many of us still reel from its trauma?” (21). Rushdie and Gikandi are not alone in

making such characterizations. Contemporary British national and cultural self

representation is consistently referred to as stricken with a kind of malaise: Christopher

Lane debates whether or not “Britain’s situation would appear closer to melancholia than

mourning” (232); Benedict Anderson points out that a nation’s narratives are affected by

“all profound changes in consciousness, [which] by their very nature, bring with them

characteristic amnesias” (204); and Fredric Jameson has claimed that imperialism.appears

in Western literature as “formal symptoms” (64). While for some, the dissolution of the

British Empire enabled a creative “postimperial aporia,” for others, empire’s dissolution

had the opposite effect. This is not a call to pity for the “poor” colonizers; nor is it an

attempt to posit the English as victims: however, analyzing empire’s demise as a trauma,

because of the ensuing and parallel demise of the traditional English cultural identity,

goes a long way towards explaining such recurrent references of malaise and dis-ease.

In her book, Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth examines Freud’s theory of

“traumatic neurosis,” writing that it is “the unwitting reenactment of an event that one

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cannot simply leave behind” (2). If, as Gikandi claims, English identity or “Englishness”

“had been produced by a continuous conflict between the center and its Celtic and

colonial peripheries” (xvii), then it can be assumed that the loss of the use of these

peripheries as mirrors which reflected back a certain perception of England and the

English must have profoundly affected the construction of cultural identity. In chapter

two, I show how Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, written about one woman’s normal day

in London in June of 1924, is permeated with thoughts of empire and the war. Characters

will continually intersperse thoughts of “the dead; of the flag; of Empire” (25) in the

midst of their daily activities. Such a presence is indicative of the breach the war has

opened up. Having just experienced the war, Woolf naturally taps into its continued

effect on the everyday lives of everyday Londoners. Why, then, does a writer such as Pat

Barker return to the war in the trilogy she writes from 1991 to 1995? I use Cathy

Caruth’sUnclaimed Experience to argue that English novelists like Pat Barker return to

the war precisely to alleviate the implications of the demise of empire. War was the

traumatic moment which revealed to the British the very instability of their empire. If, as

Caruth reads Freud, trauma is alwaysnot “ known in the first instance” and “returns to

haunt the survivor later on” (4), then choosing war as a topic is a way to begin a cultural

healing by returning to explore what at the time was too painful to do so. “In trauma, that

is, the outside has gone inside without any mediation” (Caruth 59), so novels about this

trauma will serve as a means for such mediation. Caruth explains that “Through the

notion of trauma, I will argue, we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed

not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely

permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Caruth 11). By

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. writing about the war and emphasizing its connections to empire, Barker uses

“history”—the events of World War I—to understand empire’s loss. Likewise, Margaret

Drabble—by including in her trilogy so many references to empire and how England has

changed because of empire’s dissolution—addresses what these constant illness

references are indicative of: the cultural need to re-live the trauma of the end of empire

as a working out of the question central to a traumatic neurosis—namely, “what does it

mean to survive?” (Caruth 60). InThe Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and especially

in The Gates of Ivory, Drabble addresses just what it means to “survive” empire and its

dissolution, and portrays a new, postimperial, world order. In contrast, war plays a role

that is just as tightly connected to empire, yet not at all cathartic in Ghosh’s The Shadow

Lines. His narrator has to figure out a way to release the stranglehold that war still has on

his nation’s construction of its history. War is a remains of empire that Ghosh’s narrator

needs to excavate and wants to eradicate.

Since World War I is just the first major war in what will prove to be a century of

deadly skirmishes, my dissertation is not limited to the scope and implications of that

particular war. As Eric Hobsbawm claims, “Since August 1914 we have lived in the

world of monstrous wars, upheavals and explosions” (327), and I examine the

representation of many of these “wars and upheavals” as they are used in novels in

relation to empire. As outlined previously, I use war as the key point of entry into the

empire and novel connection, and claim that war operates in the novel on three essential

fronts: as resulting from and encoding imperial tensions, as the traumatic event which

magnifies empire’s dissolution, and as the only acceptable model for a nation in crisis. I

begin with the representation of World War I in novels, because that war first caused or

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revealed anxieties over the British Empire’s strength and longevity. I use Virginia

Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, written shortly after the war, to emphasize how the anxieties

which the war created did not end with it; instead, the war fashioned a minefield of

doubts and insecurities through which the average English citizen of that time period had

to navigate her and his everyday.

My focus remains with World War I in my next chapter, in which I explore how

and why it is represented in the novels of a contemporary author looking back at that

specific historical moment with a specific need and intention in mind. I assert that it is no

coincidence that World War I became a popular subject in the late eighties and early

nineties, and that its sudden resurgence as a literary topic is indicative of the belated

processing of a cultural traumatic neurosis. As the moment which revealed the beginning

of the end of the British Empire, novelists turn to World War I to come to terms with and

become acclimatized to this change in cultural identity. In herRegeneration trilogy, Pat

Barker approaches World War I with the benefit of hindsight and concentrates on the

psychiatrist, W. H. R. Rivers, as a historical figure who can act as witness to—and

therefore make sense of—this dissolution of empire.

However, World War I is not the only historical event which contemporary

novelists use to process the demise of empire; so instead of limiting the focus of my

dissertation to the parameters of World War I, I also explicate novels in which the author

uses other wars as a way of commenting on and revealing similar significant truths about

empire’s remains. I first pass over the Second World War in favor of Margaret Drabble’s

use of the Cambodian genocide under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, deviating from

chronological order precisely because Drabble’s project with Cambodia has distinct

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. similarities to Pat Barker’s use of World War I. The Cambodian conflict, too, was also in

part a result of empire, with Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge first replacing Sihanouk, who

was seen to have too close ties to the previous French colonizers, and then cementing

their support by taking a stance against what the American “empire” was doing to Viet

Nam with bombing raids that often crossed over the Cambodian border. Atrocity stories

of other violence—what Pol Pot did to his own people, what some Americans soldiers

did in Viet Nam—become recurrent topics in Drabble’s England, and follow in the

footsteps of the earlier stories of Mutiny and World War I transgressions. Her characters

focus on the horrors caused by other empires as a way of indirectly processing

simultaneous feelings of guilt and nostalgia for the dissolution of the British Empire.

They resituate their own feelings of loss into the obvious chaos of Cambodia, because

there the scars of war are overt—in contrast to the cloaking that forty years has wrought

on England’s diminished status—and also there the scars are not the “fault” of the British

Empire. Drabble’s use of the genocidal horrors of Cambodia parallels Barker’s use of the

unexpected horrors of World War I: both novelists turn to these specific historical events

to process the shift of cultural identity occasioned by the demise of the British Empire.

Finally, I move back in time to World War II and to various conflicts that

occurred in India in the sixties and seventies, such as India’s war against China in 1962,

and partition-related riots. With the end of World War II came the official end of the

British Empire, when India gained independence in 1947. World War II was

undoubtedly a tragedy for Europe and the western world, as it brought to fruition

anxieties that initiated with World War I; however, to India, World War II was a more

complex signifier, since it opened the door to a new world order, in which India’s

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. independence was inevitable. In The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh shows how the war

was in many ways a happy time for his narrator’s relatives living in London. The

changes that the war was commencing had the possibility of being changes for the

better—from the viewpoint of the colonized. The colonizer’s bane became the boon of

the colonized. However, Ghosh’s portrayal of some of the benefits of World War II is

not simply positive, for in my dissertation I assert that while perhaps speeding the demise

of empire, war also becomes a way that the stranglehold of empire keeps a firm grasp on

India. War is the only available trope that a nation can use to explain and tell the stories

of its own struggles. It becomes the valiant violence, and silences all other types of

violence. Ghosh’s narrator comes to the realization that the riots that occur in India

during and after Partition do not become part of the historical record of India as a nation,

whereas India’s wars—such as its war against China in 1962—are analyzed, discussed,

and written about: such discourses of war do not allow room for accompanying

discourses of riots. War thus becomes part of the remains of empire, duplicating how the

narratives of the nations of the west still impose themselves on the narratives of the

nations of the east.

Although I begin with World War I in novels and what it reveals about empire, I

expand the focus of my dissertation to include other wars and violent conflicts which are

also used by authors to portray and comment upon the prominence of empire’s remains.

In doing so I disclose the multiple functions of war as it intersects with empire in the

novel: war shares the binaries of empire, it is the primary tool of empire, it becomes the

symptom of the crisis of empire, it carries on the tasks of empire, it magnifies the

workings of empire, it becomes empire’s coliseum-sized remains. The novels I choose to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. include all contain, utilize, and develop several of these junctures between war and

empire, overlapping in some instances and in others proceeding in different directions. In

Mrs Dalloway, for example, Woolf reveals the limitations of the binaries of war and

empire, while also portraying the anxieties over empire raised by the First World War,

Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy incorporates these two aspects as well, and also

furthers the connection between war and empire, by using war to work out the traumas

caused by empire’s loss; Margaret Drabble also explicates this traumatic loss of cultural

identity resulting from the end of empire; and Ghosh shows the limitations of the binaries

of war while also proving war to itself be a significant means of empire’s perpetuation.

My dissertation identifies and speaks to the war/empire nexus in the novels of the

twentieth century.

In Excavating the Remains of Empire, I examine how twentieth-century wars and

violent upheavals are represented in novels, and conclude that novelists are frequently

using war specifically as an instrument that allows them to access, both directly and

indirectly, the topic of the British Empire and its dissolution. Novels, then, that in many

ways seem to be post-empire, are in fact as riddled with the remains of empire as earlier

novels were with the workings of empire. An important part of my project, therefore, is

to read certain novels fo r empire that have hitherto been neglected in postimperial

studies. If, as Said has claimed, “Without empire...there is no European novel as we

know it” (69), then it is necessary to extend such readings of empire in novels to those

novels written after empire’s demise: for if empire once played such a significant role in

the novel, then surely it does not just disappear after the official date of empire’s end.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Empire must still be represented in novels—although perhaps in a different guise. I

claim that empire does still play an essential role in the novel written in the second half of

the twentieth-century, and I propose that a beneficial way of illustrating this empire

preoccupation is to briefly emphasize the many similarities between such novels written

towards the end of the twentieth century, and a novel that is widely acknowledged as

being “about” empire and its problems—such as E. M. Forster’sA Passage to India.

Forster’s A Passage has generated a small industry of books and essays devoted

to discussion and explication of what it reveals about imperialism. It is a text that

acknowledges the beginning of the end of empire: in doing so it breaks with previous

colonialist literature by, for example, “serv[ing] as a central literary challenge to the kind

of knowledge-based colonial power envisioned by Kipling in K im ” while also illustrating

the often overlooked “confluence of modernism and imperialism” (Booker 42). That A

Passage To India provides a commentary on empire has already been well-established, so

it is a helpful “touchstone” to use to make the connection between it and other novels

which are not widely acknowledged as having a similar imperial focus. As I have been

saying, there seems to be a frequent assumption made that when the British Empire was

dismantled physically or geographically, it was also dismantled symbolically; when

studies are made of empire in literature today, their focus is usually on novels written

overtly about the colonies—like Forster’s A Passage To India—or by authorsfrom the

former colonies. However, by comparing Forster's A Passage to novels that have been

“allowed” to be post-empire, the direct similarities between them help make the case that

empire is still a preoccupation and frequent theme in novels written forty to fifty years

after empire’s demise. Using Forster as a touchstone colonial text makes it clear that we

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. have, perhaps, been too quick to disassociate England and certain “English” writers from

the postcolonial situation. It becomes evident how prominent a place empire still sustains

in the English novel of the late twentieth century.

As two of the most prominent British modernist novelists, Forster and Woolf are

often paired, especially since they were also from the same social circles. But it is this

friendship and historical proximity that is used to bring the two together, rather than any

similarity in the subject matter of their novels. Such an absence is itself noteworthy: A

Passage to India and Mrs Dalloway were only published a few months apart, but in

contrast to the “industry” generated by A Passage, studies explicating empire in Mrs

Dalloway are relatively recent in date. As such, the connections made between the two

novels do not usually involve empire, despite the fact that comparisons between the two

can emphasize the pervasiveness of empire—and anxieties regarding it—in both novels.

Comparing the two is one way of demonstrating how novels set in London are as

significantly about empire as novels situated in the colonies.

The similarities between Mrs Dalloway and A Passage to India abound. For

example, as Clarissa learns from the experience of her “double” or alter ego, Septimus

Warren Smith, a World War One veteran, so Adela Quested, the main character of A

Passage To India, has a similar double in her traveling companion and future mother-in-

law, Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore— and the personal crisis she faces in India—has been

considered to be Forster’s portrayal of a particular kind of identity crisis occurring as a

result of the war “Her experience becomes, in fact, allegorical of the breakdown of

nineteenth-century reliance upon cultivation of human affection when faced with the

horror of the First World War” (Das xi). Septimus is devastated by the war, and Mrs.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Moore is a representation of the devastation of the war both characters enable the

protagonists—Garissa and Adela—to experience an epiphany about their roles in the

world.

The similarities between the two novels extend further. Just as Adela is

tormented by the echo she hears after her trauma in the cave, so Clarissa is continually

bothered and interrupted by the sounds of Big Ben chiming out the hour. Furthermore,

throughoutMrs. Dalloway, Clarissa often appears to struggle against what her life has

become once she made the decision to marry Richard Dalloway. As I will show in

chapter two, she devises her own way of manipulating the traditional marriage role, and

is as content within it as she is discontent. However, her unhappiness makes her able to

understand and identify with the shell-shocked Septimus—a man ruined by merely

following along the common route laid out by empire: enlisting to fight for the

protection of us against them. The restrictions of marriage and the restrictions of empire

thus intersect Forster also has his main female character, Adela Quested, wrestle with

marriage, while using the revelations of empire to talk herself out of succumbing to such

a marriage. Marriage and empire change a woman in strangely conjunctive ways. For

example, Adela comes to India with a healthy skepticism as to the role of the British

there, but after agreeing to marry Ronny Heaslop, she automatically becomes an “Anglo-

Indian” and must carry the racist baggage that comes with such a title and identity. An

hour or two after the engagement occurs, Adela already seems different. Forster writes,

His [Ronny’s] voice grew complacent again; he was here not to be pleasant but to keep the peace, and now that Adela had promised to be his wife, she was sure to understand. 5’What does our old gentleman of the car think?’ she asked, and her negligent tone was exactly what he desired. (96)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Adela has no Sally Seton with whom she can discuss the implications of marriage, so she

uses the canvas of empire to express her misgivings. She looks at the Marabar Hills as

the sun sets and muses, “How lovely they suddenly were! But she couldn’t touch them.

In front, like a shutter, fell a vision of her married life. She and Ronny would look into

the club like this every evening.. .while the true India slid by unnoticed” (47). She

connects what she dislikes about the role of the British in India, with what she fears she

will dislike about her role in marriage. Virginia Woolf makes a similar conflation

between marriage and empire when she has Clarissa frequently reassure herself about the

choice she made to marry Richard Dalloway instead of Peter Walsh, by negatively

equating Peter with his role as an administrator in India.

What is important and useful about these similarities is that they reveal a personal

and political anxiety that is connected to war and empire and what war has revealed

about empire. Such similarities expose a kind of minefield of cultural knowledge—an

imperial unconscious—which is potentially explosive and difficult to negotiate. Keith

Booker points out that “By the late nineteenth century India was so integral to the British

national self-image that the idea of a Britain without India was almost inconceivable”

(19). However, by the early twentieth century, when Forster and Woolf both wrote their

novels, the idea that Britain would soon be a Britain bereft of India was becoming

impossible to ignore; both novels encode this crisis and sense of loss as a critique of

imperialism. The trauma of this dissolution of empire subtly begins to infiltrate and

perhaps take the place of “the prominence of India as a motif in British literature”

(Booker 66).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Parallels also exist between A Passage and Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, despite

the fact that war is only mentioned in the very last pages of A Passage. Forster has Aziz

declare to Fielding that “‘Until England is in difficulties we keep silent, but in the next

European war—aha, aha! Then is our time’” (321). Here Aziz alludes to how the chaos

that comes with war is also the chaos of empire, and it is in such moments that empire

reveals its vulnerability. Although Forster’s English characters in India frequently refer

back to the military “glories” of the Mutiny, only Aziz refers to the fact that there has just

been a “European war,” and that the peace which ensued from it is, perhaps, temporary.

Forster, although he does write quite critically about empire, mostly ignores the war and

cannot seem to resist the temptation to orientalize India, often positioning it as England’s

sensual and chaotic opposite, as seen both from the viewpoint of the English characters

who are prejudiced against India, and also from the point of view of the supposedly more

neutral narrative voice. Critical of the English presence in India and of the administrators

there who maintain that presence, Forster is still pessimistic at the thought of India

becoming England’s diplomatic equal. He even has the sympathetic Fielding scorn the

idea: “India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century

sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat!” (322). In contrast,

Pat Barker, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, addresses many of the same issues

occurring in the same time-period as Forster, yet she embraces the war which Forster

ignores, connecting it specifically to the corruptions of empire which Forster readily

captured in his novel. Barker’s character W. H. R. Rivers—who is in many ways the

Fielding equivalent in her Regeneration trilogy—is able to see the scope of empire’s

inequities and its impending demise because of what the horrors of World War I have

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revealed to him about the workings of empire. Rivers’s war experiences make him go

back in his mind and revisit his experiences as an ethnologist researching the Islanders of

the Torres Straits for his book on kinship. It is this juxtaposition that Barker has Rivers

make between war and empire which enables Rivers to grasp what remains just out of

Fielding’s reach, that empire is based on a system of fabricated dichotomies, whose

boundaries can, should, and will be dismantled.

It is significant that Rivers’s investigation into and processing of his own

experience as a British academic doing “fieldwork” in the colonies takes place in the

context of his work as a war psychiatrist working with shell-shocked soldiers. Thus, the

view that the reader gets of Rivers’s evaluation of empire is tempered by and in a way

inseparable from what he has witnessed on the frontlines of empire’s war. Rivers might

have felt the same way at the time he was in the Torres Straits in 1898—he of course

might then have viewed the witch-doctor Njiru as his equal, as he does when he

reminisces about his experiences. But because Barker presents Rivers’s colonial

experiences as a recollection made during the war, he—and the reader—sees empire

through the lens of war; the benefit he achieves from this retrospection parallels the

benefit Barker has in writing about empire after its demise. Therefore, whereas Forster’s

Aziz can make the realization that the desire of British women like Adela and Mrs.

Moore to simply see India is part of the way empire retains its power, when he claims

that “This pose of ‘seeing India' which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore

was only a form of ruling India” (306), Fielding himself, although sympathetic to the

colonized, is not able to do the same. He cannot see the significance of his simply being

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in India—and that, like Rivers’s ethnological observations, his presence there as a school

teacher is part of how empire works.

Just as Forster uses the Mutiny as a touchstone event, while avoiding addressing

the more recent and disturbing events at Jallianwala Bagh, so Margaret Drabble, inThe

Gates o f Ivory, writes about the dissolution of the British Empire by having her

characters be preoccupied with Cambodia, a country which—significantly—was not a

colony of Britain. Her characters—while forward-thinking enough to not overtly mourn

the loss of empire—frequently refer to the change in cultural identity caused by the

dissolution of empire. Stephen Cox, one of Drabble’s main characters, travels to

Cambodia with the perhaps irreconcilable goals of being artistically inspired and

researching the atrocities of Pol Pot. His passage east is very much motivated by the

colonial literature of the past—so much so that at a crucial moment for Stephen in

Cambodia, the narrator interrupts by declaring: “Beware what you read when young....

It may bring you to this shore, this brink, this bridge” (356). Stephen constantly has

Conrad in mind, but Kurtz is not Stephen’s only literary forebear, there is an underlying

Forster element to Stephen’s passage East, so that whereas he ends up, perhaps, a Kurtz,

he begins an Adela Quested.

If in The Gates o f Ivory, Conrad’s Heart o f Darkness functions as the 1857

Mutiny—as a rallying cry for empire despite the fact that many of the characters admit to

not grasping its import and will thus query “What actuallyhappens in it? Who is going

where and why?” (237)—then Forster is the Jallianwala Bagh, with the end of the kind of

passage East represented in his novels more what Stephen seems to be unconsciously

mourning. Stephen never mentions Forster—it is Conrad whom he tries to emulate—yet

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. his reactions in moments of crisis are voiced in Forster’s terms. He hears the “bourn

bourn” which was the sound of nothingness confronting Adela in the Marabar Caves; and

although lying sick in the jungle, his experiences are aligned with Adela’s when he

thinks, “Why try to describe the real thing? It was not even very real. It was a shadow of

a shadow on the wall of a cave” (356). Drabble has Stephen describe himself as an “ old-

fashioned book person,” and his passage East reflects this. In a postmodern way,

however, Stephen is aware of his anachronisms. While at a border camp waiting to begin

his journey into Cambodia, Stephen looks around at his various fellow-traveiers and

thinks, “Were they out of step with their age, all of them, a ragged hangover from the

past, emotional cripples, nostalgic dreamers of dreams, bora out of their true time?...

Have they been unable to adapt to the eighties?” (124). Drabble writes that “Stephen Cox

hangs between two worlds. He is a go-between” (275); yet Stephen also seems to “hang”

between two eras, the imperial and postimperial. By referencing Forster’s A Passage in

times of crisis, Drabble indicates that these crises are empire-related. When her

characters search for a personal and cultural identity in the historical moment of the late

twentieth century, it becomes evident that any passages East will be less Conrad and

more Forster—yet not even a Forster passage, quite. While Forster still posited India as

Britain’s other, despite his awareness of the problems inherent in doing so. Drabble has

her characters come to the belated conclusion that they can no longer define themselves

against a colonial—or postcolonial—East

Amitav Ghosh revisions A Passage to India in his novel, The Shadow Lines.

Ghosh opens The Shadow Lines with an Indian family making the “reverse” passage from

India to England. His novel begins: “In 1939, thirteen years before I was bom, my

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. father’s aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib” (3). By

establishing such a passage in his first sentence, Ghosh signals to the reader that his novel

is a postimperial response to E. M. Forster’s A Passage To India. The passages that

Ghosh’s characters will make, from this 1939 trip to the narrator’s academic research trip

in the late seventies and early eighties, are very much o f the new world order, and as

such, are significantly different from the passages of Forster’s characters. Ghosh’s May

Price does travel to India like Adela Quested did before her, and, like Adela, unwittingly

ends up in the center of a conflict. However, whereas in Forster’s novel the conflict only

served to solidify the opposing mindsets of both the Indians and the English, and thus

sent each side back to their comer of the ring, so to speak, Ghosh’s narrator tries to de

code all the intricacies of the events set off by May’s visit. Many of the scenes in The

Shadow Lines reference scenes of A Passage; in the way that they differ can be seen

some of the transitions made from colonial to postcolonial times. However, Ghosh uses

the correspondence between the two novels to indicate that in the seventies—the present

time of the novel—there is still a “shadow” of colonialism which still plies the colonialist

trade, so to speak. Ghosh thus questions thepost of the postimperial state.

To see the method in the way Ghosh parallels and updates certain scenes from A

Passage, I am going to explicate a seemingly insignificant moment that occurs shortly

after Adela Quested has come to India to see her friend, Ronny Heaslop, in action as a

Colonial Administrator. While taking an evening car-ride in the Nawab’s car, they have

an accident and the car ends up in the embankment Thus ensues chaos—the kind which

Forster enjoys conceiving of as part of India and the experience of India. So picture the

scene: it is now quite dark, the car lies mostly off the road and in the embankment in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. countryside, the driver begins to fix the car, the Nawab is upset, Ronny and Adela putter

and hover, and whatever the car hit—a hyena, buffalo, and goat are all proposed as the

unlucky beast—is on the loose. What else can round out this scenario? Enter a pug.

Miss Derek, an Englishwoman who works for a Maharani in the Mudkul State, and has

more or less hijacked her employer’s car for a few days, appears on the road in said

car—just in the nick of time. Her companions are a harmonium and two dogs. Ronny

asks for a lift and she replies, “I’ll take three of you if one’ll sit in front and nurse a pug.

No more” (91). The Anglo-Indian driver is left behind repairing the car (there is no room

in Miss Derek’s car—and at this point no room in the universe—for such a conjoining of

England and India), Ronny and Adela are safely ensconced in the back where they can

resume holding hands, and the Nawab Bahadur? He’s stuck in the front with the pug on

his lap. It is colonial times: an Indian animal has caused chaos and damage, and an

English animal is used to humiliate an Indian man.

Now skip to about fifty years later. The English May Price—very much Adela

Quested’s counterpart—has come to India to see it, and to perhaps begin a relationship

with Tridib, the narrator’s uncle; Tridib “met” May when she was a baby and he a young

boy in London, and had recently started up a correspondence with May that was romantic

in subtext May, like Adela, is troubled by what is now Britain’s colonial past in India.

She is horrified by the Queen Victoria memorial in Calcutta, and is very much a

principled idealist who believes the world can change and that she can help change it

May and Tridib are taking the narrator along on a car-trip to Diamond Harbour. The

narrator is only eight or nine, here, yet he recognizes that there is tension between May

and Tridib: they seem to have been fighting. As they are speeding down the highway,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. they see a shape in the road ahead, slow down as they pass it, and notice that it is a dog

who has been hit by a car and is dying, but is not yet dead. Tridib wants to keep going,

but May forces him to stop the car so that she can do something to help. What follows is

an absolutely horrific scene in which May uses a dull penknife to end the dog’s suffering.

No need for detail. Suffice it to say that Tridib at first thinks May is crazy to do what she

does, and May gets angry at Tridib for at first not helping: “Can’t you help a bit? she

said. All you’re good for is words. Can’t you ever do anything?” (170). To interpret this

dog scene is a more difficult venture than to interpret Forster’s pug and goat moment,

because it reflects its postcolonial tensions and interconnections which are not as black

and white as colonial tensions were made out to be. Tridib, who often is anglophile in

inclination, wants to do nothing here, while May, who has guilt over the colonization of

India, wants to help; everything is complicated further because to help here means to kill

the Indian dog. May does end its suffering, but only after adding a new kind of suffering

and fear to the mix.

May is able to do more than Adela, but as an Englishwoman in India with a

colonial legacy that has not been dismantled along with its colonial status, May ends up

stepping into the mire created by the partition that followed Britain’s precipitous and

disorganized withdrawal. The chaos that May unwittingly causes reveals how stringently

detrimental the connection still is between empire and India. May thus follows in

Adeia’s footsteps, yet this time the outcome is deadly. May ends up in the center of a

calamity that does not depart that significantly from the calamity unwittingly caused by

Forster’s Adela. Ghosh has May evoke Adela, and in doing so proves that many

tensions, nursed by the British Empire, have yet to dissipate. That Ghosh, and the other

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. novelists in this dissertation, use, reference, and revision Forster’s A Passage To India, a

touchstone text for the problems of empire, is emblematic of how empire—even in its

dismantled state—is still a central concern of the contemporary novel set in England.

In her essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” the

postcolonial critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, writes that “It should not be possible to

read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism,

understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation

of England to the English” (262). If this is true of nineteenth-century literature, then it

seems even more important to remember imperialism—when its function as England’s

“social mission” was beginning to falter—as a crucial part of the “cultural representation

of England to the English” in the Hrst half of the twentieth century when reading another

“woman’s text”—Mrs Dalloway, a book written in the early 1920’s. And indeed, if Mrs

Dalloway is approached with empire in mind, it becomes evident how inextricably

imperialism is a part of Mrs Dalloway's London. In Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and

Postcolonial Literature, she comments that “Virginia Woolf’s writing also houses

persisting imperialist attitudes alongside anti-colonial sentiment. This is despite—or

perhaps indeed because of—the fact that she did not herself experience the Empire at first

hand” (141-2). Whereas Woolf was never in the colonies, I argue in my chapter two,

“Knitting Together Everything & Ending on Three Notes”: 2 Becomes 3 in Virginia

Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway," that she did indeed “experience the Empire at first hand,” and

that, as Said proved with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, empire was likewise an

inextricable facet of Woolf’s London life.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Since the events of Mrs Dalloway occur on one day of June 1924, not far from the

end of the war, there are simple references to war’s proximity. In the sixth paragraph of

the novel, Garissa Dalloway thinks, “For it was the middle of June. The War was

over...thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace” (5).

With this last sentence, Garissa comforts herself that all is now as it should be: the war

is over, the British Empire can claim victory, and the heads of the empire—the King and

Queen—are home; order has been maintained. Or so it seems; for the war has created a

rupture—not only for those touched by the deaths caused by the war, but for all who

share in the general cultural consciousness. War made the dark side of empire

unignorable, and the evidence for this is revealed in Mrs Dalloway by the fact that the

tragedies of war so repeatedly are connected to issues of empire, and lie so close to the

surface of characters’ conscious thoughts. For example, a few pages after Garissa thinks

of the end of war, a limousine passes by and rumors spread that it contains a Queen,

Prince, or Prime Minister. These rumors set off a chain-reaction of thought:

for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy.... For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound. (25-6)

The supposed presence of a head of the British Empire causes a “wound” which reveals

how the thought processions involving the London everyday of the ordinary English

citizen continually bleed into thoughts of empire. This bleeding cannot be easily

stanched, however; for as Mrs Dalloway progresses, many symbols of the British state as

easily trigger such hesitations and doubts about empire—a rift the war has caused.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Virginia Woolf does not view war and empire as a pair unto themselves: instead,

she elevates the issue of gender relations to the side of war and empire, and considers

them an equally guilty trio. The language of all three institutions relies on a simplistic

binary that invariably compartmentalizes everything as this or that: in war, one side is

good, the other bad; empire is based on the us/them binary; and gender as a social

construct, of course, consists of women being “other’' to men. Woolf thought that

“Churchgoers’ practice in believing that men are better than women prepares them to

accept other hierarchies, such as ‘England is better than Germany’ or ‘our navy is better

than your navy’” (Phillips 131). Gender relations, empire, and war are constructed with a

framework of binaries—and in turn work to perpetuate this construction. In my second

chapter, then, I argue that in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf confronts these three issues which all

thrive on the division of everything into two, by having Clarissa Dalloway turn all

twosomes that she comes into contact with into three. In this way, Woolf uses the

master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Specifically, Woolf has Clarissa

Dalloway fight against the restrictions of the all-pervasive binary by consistently

choosing to bring a third person into her relationships.

Critics have long pointed out how Septimus Warren Smith serves as Clarissa

Dalloway’s double in the novel. Since Clarissa is in many ways the archetypal upper-

class middle-aged woman, it is significant that her alter ego in the book is an ill and

traumatized war veteran. By setting up all sorts of parallels and unexpected similarities

between Clarissa and Septimus, Woolf is able to raise the key point thatboth characters

have been wounded by war and are victimized by empire. However, Clarissa’s one

doubling with Septimus is far outnumbered by the many “threesomes” she is a part of.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Such triangulation—and its ensuing power shifts and tensions—ultimately becomes a

more significant pattern than her pairing with Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa is a

participant in five significant triangles: with her husband, Richard, and Peter Walsh; with

Peter Walsh and Sally Seton; with Doris Kilman and Elizabeth; with Septimus and Doris

Kilman; and with the old woman who lives across the street and Septimus. In each

relationship, it is Clarissa who continually brings a third person into what had been a

twosome; she seems to both enjoy and thrive upon the shifting balances of power which a

threesome enables. For example, when Garissa is feeling insecure about how her party is

turning out, she cheers herself up by reminding herself of her struggle with Miss Kilman

for Elizabeth’s affections. She thinks happily of “Kilman her enemy. That was

satisfying; that was real” (265). The comfortable and shifting dynamic of a trio bolsters

Clarissa: she escapes from the constraints of a binary by always complicating the

either/or with a third option. By having Clarissa always turn to a third option, Woolf is

able to subtly question the hierarchies that such binaries inevitably construct; she

connects the inherent inequalities within the traditional male/female relationship to

inequalities in the imperial world at large.

Woolf also attaches symbolic significance to the triangles which Garissa uses as a

refuge of sorts. An example of this which I explain in detail in the chapter is how in the

Clarissa-Richard-Peter triangle, Woolf complicates what is in some ways a simple love

triangle by constantly referring to Richard’s profession as a member of parliament in

England, and Peter’s as an Anglo-Indian colonial administrator. Such a comparison

always ends up in Richard’s favor, for Peter seems sullied by his connection to India:

doing the empire’s dirty work often makes Peter the weak link in that particular triangle.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (This is despite the fact that, like the Bertrams’ Antiguan plantation in Jane Austen’s

Mansfield Park, Peter Walsh’s work is the work that makes Garissa Dalloway’s London

financially possible.) The power shifts that are represented in the Garissa-Richard-Peter

triangle, therefore, go beyond the personal circumstances of both men desiring to marry

Garissa; instead Woolf uses the dynamics between the three characters to signify the

tensions which were beginning to manifest themselves in that particular historical

moment of 1924 post-war Britain. In such a comparison between a member of

parliament and a colonial administrator in India, Peter does not fare well: as an Anglo-

Indian, Peter Walsh becomes less the third point of the triangle and more the third wheel.

That most of her characters associate a negative connotation with Peter’s work in India

reveals much about Woolf’s own view of empire. By showing Garissa gaining insight

from and making things better for herself by changing a simple two to a more

complicated three, Woolf thus is able to hint at the benefits that would also be attained by

similarly complicating the simple binaries of empire and war.

In my third chapter, “Empire Revised in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy,” I

examine how Barker documents the cracking surface of Empire in her trilogy, using the

war as a way to expose both the discrepancies and hypocrisies of empire, as well as the

more positive changes that accompany its nascent dissolution. All three novels of

Barker’s World War I trilogy— Regeneration, The Eye In The Door, and The Ghost

Road—combine the actions and stories of fictional characters, with real-life people with

documented war stories of their own, such as the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried

Sassoon, and the psychiatrist, W. H. R. Rivers. Setting her fiction during the Great

War—an event which is considered to have had a significant and irreversible impact on

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cultural consciousness, a marker of the end of an entire way of being, and blamed for

“revers[ing] the Idea of Progress” (Fussell 8)—enables Barker to portray this supposedly

new disillusionment, as well as show that the war did not so much create anew a

troubling situation, but rather ripped the curtain away from the long-established workings

of the British Empire. By constantly juxtaposing issues of war with issues of empire,

Barker shows that the upheaval revealed by the Great War was there fomenting just under

the surface all along.

Barker’s choice of topic for her trilogy can be seen as an indication that this

upheaval is still a concern in England today. All three novels were hugely successful:

Regeneration was shortlisted for the Booker prize and chosen by the New York Times as

one of the four best novels of 1992;The Eye in the Door won the 1993 Guardian fiction

prize; and The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize. Regeneration was made into a

movie, joining in the sudden popularity and spate of Hollywood World War II movies.

Furthermore, Barker was not the only one to be focusing on the World Wars; in the early

nineties, for example, Rebecca West’s The Return o f the Soldier and Susan Hill’sStrange

Meeting—both, war novels—were reissued. In a review inThe New Yorker of several

World War II books, John Gregory Dunne muses on how the publication of such books

“crowns a season during which we have seen America grow particularly fond of the

Second World War” because “the war in Europe is viewed largely as an American

triumph” (98). I will posit that the English have returned to the First World War for

precisely the opposite reasons—a reliving of the beginning of the end.

It is in The Ghost Road, the third novel of the trilogy, where Barker really makes

the connection between empire and war clear. The chapters alternate between the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. activities of one of Dr. Rivers’s patients, Billy Prior, at the front, and Rivers’s own

memories of doing ethnological field work in the colonies of Melanesia. In case the

reader does not immediately see the cause and effect going on here, Barker includes

narrative hints, from the more subtle duplication of scene and language (switching from

Rivers’s tent in Melanesia to Billy Prior’s tent at the front), to explicit musings of the

war/empire connection made by Rivers himself. In addition to frequently pairing the

effects of war with the effects of empire, Barker’s Rivers probes the alleged differences

between the ways of the colonizers and the colonized. For example, after Rivers views

the shrine that his landlady has created for her soldier son killed in the war, he “thought

about what he’d just seen: the portrait, the flowers. A shrine. Not fundamentally

different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he’d gone with Njiru. The same

human impulse at work. Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural

recognition” (116-7). By dismantling these boundaries between the “us” of the English

and the “them” of the colonized Melanesians, Rivers questions the whole (shared)

foundation of war and empire.

Pat Barker’s Billy Prior, a fictional participant in World War I, is a product of

hindsight; this is not to say that Billy Prior is unbelievable, but that he is a man who

would be quite at home in the second half of the twentieth century, as well. Although

suffering from the same war-induced disease as Septimus Warren Smith, Billy reflects

the fact that Barker wrote her novels seventy years after Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway;

shell shock is no longer a half-inexplicable condition. Whereas Septimus’s condition is

only sketched, Billy’s is analyzed fully. Cathy Caruth describes how “trauma is not

locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first

instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). For Septimus, this trauma is his

experience in the war, in general, but more specifically his witnessing of the death of his

best friend, Evans. Woolf writes that “when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice,

in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of

a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War

had taught him. It was sublime” (130). Septimus does not consciouslyknow how he has

been affected by Evans’s death and thus it is that he now sees Evans everywhere he

looks.

In contrast, Billy Prior understands exactly what he is going through—although

such knowledge does not necessarily give him control over his mental state. Where

Septimus’s attraction to Evans is just hinted at—they are “two dogs playing on a hearth

rug” and ’They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel

with each other” (130)—Billy Prior is fully aware of his bisexuality. And whereas

Septimus’s shell shock has apparently been caused by his war experiences alone, Barker

has Billy Prior’s shell shock be caused by his war experiences as well as by his childhood

experiences of everyday English patriarchal life. While Septimus cannot escape from his

memories of Evans, Billy’s shell shock manifests itself by his ability to “blank out,” or

escape, certain experiences. As a child, Billy would go into a trance when his father

came home drunk and abused his mother; the same thing now happens to him when he is

at the front The war, then, works as a kind of extension of the patriarchal tensions that

Billy had to deal with as a young boy. When Billy blanks out at the front his persona

becomes that of a caricature of a super-warrior. This Billy is a “warrior double, a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. creature formed out of Flanders clay” who tells his psychiatrist that ‘“I was bom two

years ago. In a shell-hole in France. I have no father”’ (E 240-5). As a soldier, this

double follows the wartime ideal to the letter, yet he is portrayed as frightening, not

admirable, and thus with his odiousness mocks the ideal. In contrast to Septimus, who

was harassed by his doctors, Billy seeks out psychoanalysis with the wonderful Dr.

Rivers in order to pinpoint exactly what is happening to him. Barker thus rewrites the

Great War and the beginnings of the dissolution of empire with a postmodern character

who can cope with the occurring historical crises. She makes him aware of what is going

on in a way that is soothing to the reader; for Billy, the trauma is known as it happens, so

it is never a trauma, quite. Barker sends Billy back in time to analyze the event from all

sides as it happens, thus thwarting the surprise of the trauma of the war and negating the

“compulsion to repeat” (Freud 21). Billy is a World War I soldier with the benefit of

post-World War II expertise.

It is the traits Barker emphasizes about her three main characters—Siegfried

Sassoon, Billy Prior, and W. H. R. Rivers—that reveal much about her methods

regarding empire. Barker’s Sassoon is supposed to be a portrayal of the real man, and as

such she does not deviate much from the known facts about his life and wartime

experiences. He is very much a man of his times and is tormented by the futility of

trench warfare. Barker emphasizes Sassoon’s many dual aspects: that he wrote an anti

war declaration while at the same time being a much medalled and respected soldier, that

he chose to return to the Front and would initiate daredevil raids—and then return to

camp and write an anti-war poem. He is a writer, yet he is writing from within the

historical situation; he does not have the benefit of hindsight In contrast as we have

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seen, Barker’s Billy Prior—a wholly fictional character—is in many ways a postmodern

character. Billy crosses all boundaries: he can pass for both working and officer class,

he is both gay and straight, healthy and sick, pro and anti-war; more importantly,

however, Billy is always incredibly aware of what is going on around him and the

underlying reasons for it Barker has set loose into the fray of the Great War a

postmodern fellow equipped with hindsight and the mindset of the second half of the

twentieth century.

Ultimately, however, it is River’s task to psychoanalyze and help both Sassoon

and Billy. He is the hearer of their testimony of the war; he processes and integrates the

modem and postmodern viewpoints. Rivers is very much a Freudian—and as such is

slightly ahead of his own times. He has studied Freud’s theories, and takes the Freudian

approach to the treatment of his patients. As Shoshana Felman writes in Testimony,

Freud began the “psychoanalytic dialogue...in which the doctor’s testimony does not

substitute itself for the patient’s testimony, but resonates with it, because, as Freud

discovers, it takes two to witness the unconscious” (15). This is Rivers’ role in Barker’s

trilogy: he, perhaps as a stand-in for the reader, is able to go farther than Sassoon, a

victim of his times, and Billy, a victim of being out of his times. Rivers, as a hearer of

testimony, is the one who is able to acknowledge—and finally celebrate—empire’s

demise.

In the Thatcherite eighties, there was a rather bizarre resurgence of nostalgia for

empire evident in film projects, television, and general cultural commentary. As Salman

Rushdie declared in an essay written in 1983, “Anyone who has switched on the

television set, been to the cinema or entered a bookshop in the last few months will be

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. aware that the British Raj, after three and a half decades in retirement, has been making a

sort of comeback” (87). Why did nostalgia for empire re-awaken at this particular point

in time? Keith Booker claims that the “view of twentieth-century history as the story of

the decline and fall of the empire often shows up in British literature as a desire to

awaken from the nightmare of history. This ambivalence (even horror) toward history

can best be seen in a postcolonial work like Paul Scott’sRaj Quartet...” (129). Whereas I

agree with Booker that twentieth-century British literature frequently contains the “desire

to awaken from the nightmare” or trauma of the dissolution of empire, and that novels

with an overt empire theme like Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet are, perhaps, a logical place to

start, in my fourth chapter, ‘“The Great Adventure Into Nowhere’: Postimperial Trauma

and the New Passage East in Margaret Drabble’s The Gates o f Ivory,” I assert that it is

equally as important to examine how such trauma surfaces in novels that are wrongly

disassociated from this Raj revival and postcolonial tensions. It is in these novels where

we can find the answer to why empire’s nostalgia “makes a comeback” towards the end

of the twentieth century.

Salman Rushdie and Margaret Drabble often write about the same London, yet

Rushdie’s London is automatically considered to concern the remains of empire, whereas

Drabble’s London is not given this same kind of interpretation. As I explain in chapter

four, there seems to be a history of critics classifying Drabble’s writing as having

different aims from those of her postcolonial and postmodern peers. Roberta Rubenstein,

for example, will claim that Drabble “raises complex questions about competing social

and political forces in contemporary British life” (101), yet does not note how often these

questions are connected to issues of empire. Patricia Waugh asserts that Drabble

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. eschewed most stereotypical postmodern novel characteristics and instead returned “to

the traditional preoccupations of the psychological and domestic novel, but self

consciously from the perspective of writing as a woman” (24). However, Drabble

herself, in a speech she gave to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May of

1997, sees her writing as being very much a political portrayal of the contemporary world

and classified her goals as being similar to that of Salman Rushdie. Complaining first

about the new abundance of nostalgic, historical novels, she queried, “But who, one

begins to wonder, is tackling the present? Have we abandoned it, despaired of it?” (23).

She answers these questions by championing Rushdie, claiming that “Rushdie grapples

both with the historical and the contemporary.... He confronts the contemporary world

and the urban world with a courage and an invention that outrun those who pursue him.

So it can be done” (23). Drabble then briefly outlined the novel she was working on(The

Peppered Moth), with its plot overtly Rushdiesque in scope. I believe that Drabble’s

most recent novels—the trilogy in particular—already share many components of a

Rushdie novel: they too are “historical and contemporary” and deal with the empire as it

is now—defunct—and not as it was in its “glory days”. So when Drabble concluded that

“The past can move us into the future, in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgic

retreat into the pastoral” (23), I claim that in her novels Drabble has already used the past

in such a way.

In The Gates o f Ivory, the thoughts of Drabble's characters frequently are

punctuated by references to empire. They grapple with what in the eighties and nineties

seems to be always waiting around the comen the realization of the demise of Britain’s

imperial identity and the necessity of forming a new, postimperial English identity. In

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud writes of how a person suffering from a traumatic

neurosis experiences a “compulsion to repeat” and will continually re-experience the

trauma, often in dreams and hallucinations. The traumatic neurosis forms, in part, as a

result of not being prepared for the trauma, and thus not having built up the requisite

anxiety which “protects its subject against fright and so against fright neuroses” (11).

That Drabble’s English characters are just now—forty or so years after the empire’s

official demise—coming to terms with a cultural identity that is no longer that of being

rulers over one-fifth of the land of the globe, connects to Freud’s idea of a traumatic

neurosis. The demise of empire is a culturally traumatic moment that is compulsively

returned to in order to build up the anxiety that will eventually serve as a passage to a

state of acceptance and acclimation to postimperial life. For example, in a melancholy

moment of reflection on London Bridge, Alix’s train of thought begins with her

husband’s illness and gradually travels to the figurative “Gates of Empire at Heathrow”

(294). She then thinks of the chain of peoples who have reflectively looked at the

Thames, “the No-people, the Celts, the Belgae, the Romans, the Angles, the Saxons, the

Normans, the Huguenots, the Dutch potters, the refugees from the pogroms of Russia and

Poland, the survivors of the Final Solution, the Hungarians, the Turks, the Indians, the

Pakistanis, the West Indians, the Africans, the Cypriots, the Vietnamese, the

Cambodians” (293-4). That there has been a history of a multitude of peoples in London

reassures Alix about the inhabitants of London today; perhaps the present is not so

completely divorced from the past. It is also significant that Alix’s list contains

references to empires that dominated over England; she connects her present time, then,

to other times when England were not the “rulers” so to speak. Alix’s feelings about

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contemporary England vacillate, but that a character’s thoughts can elide smoothly from

personal trauma to aspects of England’s postimperial condition reveals an uneasiness

about the repercussions of this new condition.

Drabble makes it clear that the global cultural economy is, indeed, global.

Traveling in the east, Stephen Cox frequently comments on the international aspect of his

surroundings. Wherever he goes, his fellow travelers are quite a mix; he is often noting

“the motley of hotel guests. Japanese, German, Thai, American, Korean, French,

Swedish” (52). In addition, he experiences many moments of cultural amalgam, such as

when he is traveling in Aran, Thailand, and is invited to join a small village family who

are gathered around their TV watching an old movie about Mary Magdalene (171).

Stephen is not, however, completely at ease with this: with a friend he discusses “the

notion of progress and the cycles of history and its tragic empires rising and falling”

(119); he often muses fondly about the state of buildings and monuments during the

colonial era (226). Stephen is slightly ambivalent as to how postmodern his passage to

the east should actually be: he almost seems to regret that his passage to the East does

not land him in a completely alien and “other” world. Stephen travels to Cambodia to

experience an old-fashioned, imperial passage East. He specifically seeks out a kind of

Conradian imperial adventure, yet he finds instead a rather empty tragedy. In the

eighties, the adventure stories that Stephen grew up reading can not be duplicated. This

realization comes almost too late for Stephen, but Drabble implies that the next

generation—the generation that consists of Liz Headleand’s children and the first-person

narrator, Hattie Osborne—are able to better cope with, accept, and acclimate to

England’s new role in the postimperial world.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Although seemingly willing to confront England’s postimperial state, Drabble’s

characters avoid a direct examination of their new condition by turning to Cambodia to

come to terms with how things are now. By focusing on the Cambodian genocide, the

characters make it an extension of twentieth-century traumas in general, and use it to

build up thean xiety needed to assuage their own cultural traumatic neuroses regarding

the end of the British empire—and try to do so indirectly, without having to delve into

the particulars of their empire’s decline. Drabble’s characters travel to Cambodia

because there the scars of war are overt, in contrast to the disjunctures of postimperial

England. However, Drabble’s characters also travel to Cambodia because there they can

work out their traumas relatively guilt-free: that is, Cambodia, not being an ex-colony of

the British Empire, is not England’s “fault”.

In this chapter I concentrate mainly on the third novel of Drabble’s most recent

trilogy, The Gates of Ivory. I claim that Drabble has the individual characters ofThe

Gates o f Ivory—together with her narrative voice of the text itself—react to and confront

empire’s decline in ways that serve as a specific response to how empire has been

represented in and produced by novels written throughout the long history of British

imperialism. She confronts the topic on three of the most firmly entrenched

literature/empire fronts: trauma and war, the symbolic and metaphorical use of women,

and the complicit role of literature, itself. Drabble examines the effect that the

dissolution of empire has had on everyday life in England, and establishes how literature

plays a central role in both bandaging and assuaging this trauma. Jameson writes that “it

is in our time, since World War II, that the problem of imperialism is as it were

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. restructured...” (47). We can leant about this restructuring by examining how

imperialism appears in novels like Drabble’s trilogy, the literature of our time.

In my final chapter, ‘“The Theatre of War” vs. “Memories of Riots” in Two

Novels by Amitav Ghosh,” I argue that Amitav Ghosh uses war in his novel The Shadow

Lines to show that the way events of western history are prioritized over the events of

eastern history is an insidious remnant of empire. Ghosh’s narrator is a boy who knows

England as well as he knows his own native city, Calcutta, despite the fact that when the

book begins, he has never been to England. His familiarity with London originates from

the long ago circumstance of his great great uncle, who was “a judge in the Calcutta High

Court” becoming friends with Lionel Tresawsen, a colonial administrator. The two

families have kept in touch, and the narrator grows up listening to the stories of his

second cousin, Tridib’s, stay in England as a young boy with Tresawsen’s daughter’s

family in 1939 on the eve of World War II. These stories are more than just stories to the

narrator his own identity is intertwined with them, and when he later visits London he

knows details of houses and neighborhoods as if he hadn’t just experienced these places

vicariously. His personal history is as much a mixture of England and India as is the

history of the two nations.

Cathy Caruth writes that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that

history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24); in The

Shadow Lines, Ghosh's narrator slowly becomes aware of how his Indian traumas are

given short shrift. Ghosh uses war to show how the conflicts of the west are prioritized

over the conflicts of the east, juxtaposing the centrality of the so-called World Wars with

the riots and violence experienced in India during and after partition. Ghosh asserts that

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “The theatre of war, where generals meet, is the stage on which states disport themselves:

they have no use for memories of riots” (226). The narrator of the novel struggles against

this prioritization, although he has also internalized it. He is in love with his third cousin,

Ila, who spent many years of her childhood in London and is an anglophile, to say the

least; at times Ila’s views irk the narrator, especially when she speaks of war. Ila boasts

of the experiences of the Tresawsen family during World War II, and tells the narrator

that he wouldn’t understand the thrill of working against the Germans:

You wouldn’t understand the exhilaration of events like that—nothing really important ever happens where you are. JNothing really important? I said incredulously. JWell of course there are famines and riots and disasters, she said. But those are local things, after all—not like revolutions or anti-fascist wars, nothing that sets a political example to the world, nothing that’s really remembered. (102)

Sadly, Ila here is the voice of imperial propaganda, and she expresses the kind of mindset

that the narrator is up against in his quest to make history—and the history of

India—more inclusive of other constructs besides those of the west

The narrator’s grandmother sees England as the culmination of its wars, and she,

too, holds up England’s battles as actions India needs to emulate to become a united

country: “regimental flags hang in all their cathedrals and.. .their churches are lined with

memorials to men who died in wars, all around the world? War is their religion. That’s

what it takes to make a country” (76). When she thinks of a nation’s decisive or

laudatory action, she thinks of the two world wars and their characteristics, and when she

later travels to Dhaka in what is then East Pakistan, she is surprised that India and

Pakistan are not divided by the overt trappings of wan trenches and no-man’s-land and

the like. Again, Ghosh is using war as the framework for postcolonial issues of

nationalism, by demonstrating with war that events of western history are prioritized over

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the events of eastern history. Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that “‘Europe’ remains the

sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian,’

‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on” (1); confronting such a subject becomes a central aspect

of Ghosh’s project. His narrator begins to realize that there are other worthy subjects as

he comes to see how the wars of the west and stories of it have displaced his own

experiences of riots.

When the narrator begins to research the riots he experienced in the sixties—riots

that were Partition-based—he discovers that “There are no reliable estimates of how

many people were killed in the riots of 1964. The number could stretch from several

hundred to several thousand; at any rate, not very many less than were killed in the war of

1962” (225). He ascertains that in contrast to this marked lack of data on the events of

the riots, there are shelves and shelves in the local library containing books about the

relatively minor war against China in 1962. War—an acceptable type of western

skirmish—is documented and archived, whereas no one has discussed or written about

the riots occurring around the same time. Some political events are championed while

others are silenced. By making such a point, Ghosh raises several important questions

which I explore in depth in that chapter; What is remembered and what gets to be

remembered as history? Why isn’t Partition part of the crisis of western and European

consciousness? In the oft-used dichotomy of global versus local, why does “global” so

often equal the western local? How can one keep these dominant narratives from

overtaking the narratives of one’s own life? Such questions will also resurface in

Ghosh’s later novel, The Glass Palace. Although more comprehensive and epic in scope

than The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace features this same conflict between war and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. riots. Ghosh cuts to the heart of the matter by having a character in this novel proudly

become an officer in the British army in India, before beginning to question such an

allegiance, and eventually defecting to the Indian National Army during World War II.

Having this character, Aijun, be directly involved in both war and the military allows

Ghosh to address in more detail and in a different setting the questions that the narrator of

The Shadow Lines experiences in libraries and from stories and hearsay: Aijun acts out

what the narrator of The Shadow Lines theorizes. The narratives of war position India

similarly to how colonial narratives—both historical and literary—positioned India;

therefore, the connections between war and nation have to be severed or revisioned to

more accurately reflect a truly postcolonial nation.

When Forster’s Adela Quested is making her way back home to England, she

meets an American missionary in Egypt who asks her, “‘to what duties, Miss Quested,

are you returning in your own country after your taste of the tropics?”’ and then

continues, “‘Observe, I don’t say to what do you turn, but to what do you return. Every

life ought to contain both a turn and a return” (265). Passages east used to be that simple

for the British—and that much of a resolved binary. The Empire, however, is already not

what it was, and Adela’s trip to India, where she could not keep her allegiances from

shifting back and forth from the colonizers to the colonized, is indicative of the beginning

of its end: the border between the binaries of us and them has become shadowy. Such

“shadow lines,” however, have not dissipated in the seventy plus years between Forster’s

writing of A Passage and Amitav Ghosh’s writing of The Shadow Lines. In contrast to

the advice Adela gets about a succinct turn and return, then, Ghosh’s narrator has a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. family joke about their inability to distinguish between coming and going. He writes that

if “we happened to meet an acquaintance who asked: When are you going back to

London? we would launch into a kind of patter But she has to go to Calcutta first; Not if

I’m coming to London; Nor if you’re coming to Calcutta...” (150). Their identities are

still so connected to England that there is no distinct here and there, no obvious coming

from and going to. Ghosh explains,

Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement (150)

His grandmother’s confusion originates from her alienation from her birthplace, Dhaka,

due to partition—another casualty of Empire. But what is important to note here is how

the issues Forster raises and explores in A Passage are still resonant in the novels written

about contemporary Britain. Long after the British Empire released its claims of

ownership over one-fifth of the earth, it still plays an integral—albeit different—part in

the British novel. In the following study I will examine just exactly what its role has

become. In each chapter I research the mutual implicatedness of empire and the novel,

using war or the tropes of war as the point of entry. In my chapters on Virginia Woolfs

Mrs Dalloway, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, I extend and contribute to the

postcolonial scholarship that already exists; and in my chapters on Pat Barker’s

Regeneration trilogy and Margaret Drabble's The Gates o f Ivory, I offer a much-needed

analysis and exposure of how a neglected set of postwar British novels process empire’s

aftermath.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In each of the following chapters, war frames the British Empire as it appears in

novels which represent distinct historical moments. I examine the implications of the

progression of how empire is portrayed in a novel written as empire was beginning to

dissipate; how a contemporary author looking back at this same time period uses war to

expose the beginnings of this dissolution; how empire appears in novels at the end of the

century, fifty years past its official dismantling; and how the traces of empire still have

potency post-World War II in the former colonies. The remains of empire in the

twentieth-century novel are still structures to be reckoned with, and as such should not be

granted a museum-like untouchability: this dissertation aims to show how the clockwork

of empire still occasionally will chime out the hour.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER II

“KNITTING TOGETHER EVERYTHING & ENDING ON THREE NOTES”: 2 BECOMES 3 IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS DALLOWAY

In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf first introduces the reader to her character

Septimus Warren Smith by describing him as “aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed,

wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat..( 2 0 ) . Having just spent the first twenty

pages of the novel following Clarissa Dalloway on a walk to buy flowers for the party

that she is giving that evening, the discerning reader immediately notices similarities

between this description of Septimus and that given of Clarissa pages earlier his “pale-

faced, beak-nosed” portrayal echoes Clarissa’s having “a touch of the bird about her, of

the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white

since her illness” (4). To note such parallels between Clarissa and Septimus, however, is

old hat: much has been written of how the two characters work as an incongruous pair,

with the shell-shocked Septimus strangely resonating with Clarissa’s middle-aged and

upper-class housewife. Virginia Woolf herself prepared for the making of such parallels

with an oft-quoted diary entry in which she writes that “Mrs Dalloway has branched into

a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane &

the insane side by side—something like that” (Volume Two 207). In an entry written a

little over a month later, however, Woolf again comments on the progress she is making

with Mrs Dalloway. This time she writes that, “The doubtful point is I think the character

of Mrs Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering & tinsely—But then I can bring 53

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. innumerable other characters to her support”( Volume Two 272). This entry has not been

given the attention of the first one quoted above, yet I will argue that it reveals more

about the significant underlying pattern of the novel and dynamic between the characters

than can be fathomed from simply seeing Clarissa and Septimus as doubles. For Woolf

does indeed “bring innumerable other characters to [Clarissa’s] support,” and she does so

repeatedly in a triangular manner which emphasizes what at that particular point in time

she was increasingly viewing as a critical and sinister nexus: the intersection of gender

relations, war and empire.

Clarissa Dalloway almost always relates to other characters as part of a

threesome. This triangulation—and its ensuing power shifts and tensions—ultimately

becomes a much more significant pattern than her pairing with Septimus Warren Smith.

The number of threesomes that Clarissa is a part of is cause alone for the reader to take

note; that they reflect Woolf’s own political concerns is an added bonus. Clarissa is a

participant in five significant triangles: with her husband, Richard, and Peter Walsh; with

Peter Walsh and Sally Seton; with Doris Kilman and Elizabeth; with Septimus and Doris

Kilman; and with the old woman who lives across the street and Septimus. In each

formulation, there are shifting balances of power and tensions which Clarissa seems both

to enjoy and upon which she thrives. For example, when Clarissa is feeling insecure

about how her party is turning out, she cheers herself up by reminding herself of her

struggle with Miss Kilman for Elizabeth’s affections. She thinks happily of “Kilman her

enemy. That was satisfying; that was real” (265). When she interacts with Richard, her

husband, her thoughts always return to Peter Walsh; when interacting with Peter Walsh,

she inevitably mentions Richard or Sally Seton. Clarissa always seems to be escaping

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from the—perhaps emotionally dangerous—interactions of one-on-one to what she sees

as the more comfortable and shifting dynamic of a trio. In addition to having Clarissa use

these triangles as a refuge of sorts, Woolf attaches symbolic significance to them as well.

In the Clarissa-Richard-Peter triangle—which is in some ways the closest to the

traditional homosocial triangle as defined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, with the two men

bonding with each other as they compete for the attentions and affections of the one

woman—Woolf complicates this by constantly referring to Richard’s profession as a

member of parliament in England, and Peter’s as an Anglo-Indian colonial administrator.

Such a comparison always ends up in Richard’s favor, for Peter seems sullied by his

connection to India: doing the empire’s dirty work often makes Peter the weak link in

that particular triangle, despite the fact that Peter’s work makes Oarissa London life

materially possible. The power shifts that are represented in it, therefore, go beyond the

personal circumstances of both men desiring to marry Oarissa; instead Woolf uses the

dynamics between the three characters to signify the tensions which were beginning to

manifest themselves in that particular historical moment of 1924 post-war Britain.

The triangles have a multi-dimensional aspect that is ultimately more productive

than the customary pair. To see Oarissa as part of five significant threesomes, then,

enables a reading of Mrs Dalloway that is more layered than the traditional reading,

which has focused on Oarissa and Septimus as doubles. To return to the opening

quotation then, in which Septimus is described as “aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak

nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat...” (20), I propose that in addition to

noting the similarities between that portrayal of Septimus and Oarissa, one should also

note the significance of Septimus’s attire: his “shabby overcoat” there is akin to the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “green mackintosh coat” of Miss Kilman’s which Clarissa has just been ranting against

on the previous page, by complaining that “Year in year out she wore that coat; she

perspired...” (16). At the same time that Septimus is introduced as Clarissa’s double,

then, he is also introduced as Miss Kilman’s: the three of them—Clarissa, Septimus, and

Miss Kilman—form one of the many significant triangles that can be found throughout

Mrs Dalloway. Woolfs addition of a third person, side or angle blocks the magnification

the powerless give to the powerful, for an interrupted binary is more easily dismantled

when middle ground creates more room for maneuvering.

In Virginia Woolf against Empire, Kathy Phillips claims that Woolfs “works can

be seen to de-emphasize the failings of characters in their personal relations and instead

to investigate personalities as products of dangerous ideologies” (xiii-xiv). Yet Woolf

also uses the “personal relations” of her characters to act out against the pervasiveness of

political ideologies which she sees as insidious. She does this most consistently with

Clarissa Dalloway herself, by having Clarissa constantly choose to be in a triangular

relationship with two other people, thus showing a penchant for the shifting tensions and

power struggles that such a formation allows. In doing so, Clarissa is able to combat the

restrictions of the traditional marriage, while also—in typical Clarissa fashion—both

subverting and playing along with the binaries associated with empire and war. Phillips

rightly maintains that “What remains is for someone like Woolf to bring to

consciousness, in readers if not characters, the links among sexual dishonesty, money

lust, and colonization: the coordinates of.. .Mrs Dalloway,” yet she fails to see Clarissa’s

many threesomes as being precisely how Woolf highlights these links while also showing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. resistance to them. Clarissa's constant need for a third person is symbolic of how Woolf

desires to complicate the binaric thinking so prevalent in those times of war and empire

to be complicated. Susan Bennett Smith is correct when she writes that “Oarissa is an

inadequate model of sane bereavement to counter Septimus’s insane grief’ (317); yet

there is a third person present at that moment when Oarissa is processing Septimus’s

death: the old woman across the street. Oarissa might be inadequate on her own, but

bringing in a third person gives her the strength she needs to make her “sane

bereavement” successful. Trudi Tate contends that “Garissa’s refusal to think about the

Armenian problem is a crucial moment in the novel, and provides us with ways into

thinking about the structural relationship between Oarissa and Septimus, the war-

neurotic soldier. Who is the victim, who the victimizer; who is responsible for the

suffering of others?” (159), yet I would argue that it is Woolfs belief that such a

question can only be answered by giving up the dichotomy of victim/victimizer etc.

Clarissa is not good and she is not bad, she is not merely the sane woman who will

counteract Septimus’s insanity; Woolf resists such easy categorization for her characters

as a way of mirroring how such categorization should be resisted in one’s political

thinking as well. In her diary, Woolf writes, “...I dig out beautiful caves behind my

characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is

that the caves shall connect...” (Volume Two 263). These “caves” do indeed connect:

and usually in the shape of a triangle.

Clarissa, Richard, and Peter share a connection that originated decades ago when

both Richard and Peter wanted to marry Clarissa. At first glance, their configuration

might seem to fit in the mold of the homosocial triangle as demarcated by Eve Kosofsky

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sedgwick in her Between Men: two men compete for the affections of a woman, but in

the process create a bond between themselves, which “is as intense and potent as the

bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved” (21). In fact, Sedgwick continues, one

can see “the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger, more

heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of

the lovers and the beloved” (21). Sedgwick then sites Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy

Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” in which she defines patriarchy itself as “a set of

social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though

hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable

them to dominate women” (Hartmann 14). Taking this a step further, Sedgwick asserts

that “large-scale social structures are congruent with the male-male-female erotic

triangles...” (25). Although such “large-scale social structures” definitely have a place

in the Clarissa-Richard-Peter triangle, Woolf has created this triangle with two particular

functions which are ultimately more complex and thus more rich than the homosocial

model in which two men bond while competing for the affections of one woman. In the

first, Clarissa situates her view of her marriage in between the viewpoints and different

personalities of the two men, and uses the competing affections of each man in a power

struggle which gives her comfort: in this way she has the marriage she wants without

submitting entirely. The second way that Woolf uses the triangle has less to do with the

personal relations of the characters and more to do with the political events and tenors of

post-war England: Clarissa, the perfect English hostess, sees Richard as a representative

of British rule at home, and Peter as a representative of the British Empire abroad. In

such a comparison, between a member of parliament and a colonial administrator in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. India, Peter does not fare well: as an Anglo-Indian, Peter Walsh becomes less the third

point of the triangle and more the third wheel. The disdain people feel for Peter Walsh

is, on the one hand, indicative of typical class snobbery: that Peter has to make a living

for himself is too bad. On the other hand, however, by making most of her characters

associate their negative connotation with Peter’s work so intricately with its location in

India, Woolf reveals the new—and ambivalent—view of empire.

Clarissa made a choice years ago to turn down Peter’s proposal of marriage and

instead marry Richard Dalloway. Peter was devastated; reflecting on it in the present day

he thinks of ‘The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had mattered more

than anything in the whole of his life (it might be an exaggeration—but still so it did

seem now)” (95-6), and “His relations with Oarissa had not been simple. It had spoilt

his life, he said” (292). Clarissa feels otherwise. She presents her reasons for her

decision to choose Richard early on in the novel, when she professes that “she had been

right—and she had too—not to marry him” and makes the claim mentioned before that

“in marriage a little license, a little independence there must be” (10)—independence

which Peter would not have allowed her. Clarissa does not seem to regret her choice, yet

she does have a need to constantly replay its pros and cons. Her marriage to Richard

needs Peter’s passion and possessiveness. By thinking of the alternatives she faced and

the fact that it was choices she made—her agency—which led to her life now, Clarissa is

reassured. But this reassurance, which relies on a constant interplay in Clarissa's mind

between Richard and Peter, is found not so much in the choice itself, but in the shiftings

of power that existed at the time of the choice and which still exist now. Garissa thrives

on the crosscurrents of power that such a triangle inevitably creates—and so, really, do

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Peter and Richard. In interactions between two, one of them will always bring up the

third.

Garissa is always vacillating between Richard and Peter. She will happily think

of the independence Richard grants her in their marriage, and then will have a good

moment with Peter and wonder “why did I make up my mind—not to marry him?” (61-

2). Garissa will feel that being married to Richard makes her “invisible; unseen;

unknown...this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Garissa any more; this being Mrs.

Richard Dalloway,” (24) yet then she will think of how “Richard her husband” was the

foundation for the good in her life (43). Still later, she will switch back to being troubled

by her independence, when she discovers that Richard has been independently invited to

Lady Bruton’s luncheon without her. Garissa avers that “here, there, she survived, Peter

survived, lived in each other” (12) and then admits that she does not even read Peter’s

letters when she receives them” (60). Her thoughts about the two men reveal how they

constantly switch places in her good graces.

Richard and Peter have a similar compulsion. When Richard hears of Peter’s

return while lunching at Lady Bruton’s, he is immediately prompted to remember “That

Peter Walsh had been in love with Garissa; that he [Richard] would go back direcdy

after lunch and find Garissa; that he would tell her, in so many words, that he loved her”

(162). While walking home with Hugh Whitbread after lunch, “Richard’s mind,

recovering from its lethargy, set now on his wife, Garissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved

so passionately” (173). Such an appellation seems to be one that Richard enjoys

attaching to his thoughts of Garissa; it makes her more valued and interesting, and ups

the ante of their relationship: after all, she chose him over Peter. When Richard arrives

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. home having purchased some flowers for Garissa, he finds that he “could not bring

himself to say he loved her; not in so many words” (179); but he can bring himself to

immediately bring up and discuss Peter Walsh’s return—which is code enough, not an “I

love you” necessarily but a “You love me” (179).

Right after Garissa thinks to herself that it was Peter’s “lack of the ghost of a

notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her,” Peter proves her wrong by

thinking, “I know what I’m up against...Garissa and Dalloway and all the rest of them”

(69). Peter, the rejected, is able to think fondly of Richard on his own—“He was a

thorough good sort” (112)—and Garissa on her own, yet when he thinks of them as a

couple he is inevitably angered: “With twice his wits, she had to see things through his

eyes—one of the tragedies of married life” (116). Still, it is Richard’s presence that

enables the happiest moment of Peter’s life, when they are all young and at Bourton and

Garissa leaves Richard to come back and get Peter to join them. Peter thinks “He had

never felt so happy in the whole of his life!... And all the time, he knew perfectly well,

Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it

didn’t seem to mater. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked—he and

Garissa” (94). That Richard is about to “win” Garissa is what makes that moment of

time spent with her so perfect for Peter; its perfection requires Richard as the third. Peter

also uses Garissa: when he later tells Garissa about Daisy, the woman he is engaged to

marry, telling Garissa gives Daisy luster Daisy “and her two small children became

more and more lovely as Garissa looked at them” (68). Peter needs Garissa to know

about the details of his life to make those details real to himself. All three characters

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seem to derive benefit from their threesome. The shift in power that it enables defuses

the tension of a binary. In an unusual way, the resulting situation is more equitable.

The power-play that Garissa finds so beneficial is most evident in the scene

where she and Peter are reunited after his long absence in India. As they chat, their

struggle for one-upmanship goes back and forth—which is Woolfs point No character

has all of the power all of the time. Fittingly, after Garissa and Peter embrace, they both

take out “weapons”—Peter his knife and Garissa her scissors—and, thus prepared, the

battle begins. Their words are civil and stable enough, but their thoughts oscillate

wildly. When Peter asks what Garissa is sewing, Garissa thinks “He’s very well

dressed.. .yet he always criticizes me” (60). Peter at the same time is thinking about how

all the time he’s been in India, Garissa has been doing tasks like this one, mending her

dress, while married to “the admirable Richard,” and as he thinks this he becomes “more

and more irritated, more and more agitated” (61). Sensing his distress, Garissa is

calmed and it is at this point that she remembers that Peter is “perfectly enchanting” and

happily wonders, “and why did I make up my mind—not to marry him?” (61-2).

Garissa, in a Freudian slip mistake, refers to her father’s dislike for Peter, which reminds

them both that Peter wanted to marry hen “Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost

broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief.... I was more

unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought” (62). Peter then gets annoyed with his

grief and heartbreak and stops feeling nostalgic, whereas by now Garissa’s own

nostalgia for their days at Bourton are in full-swing. Garissa becomes teary and “wiped

her eyes” (62); Peter, not moved in the same way, temporarily has the power, and his

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. response is to be annoyed: “’Yes,’ said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said” but “Stop! Stop!

he wanted to cry” (64).

Peter thinks of his life and how it must seem a failure to the Dalloways; yet

Clarissa has become insecure at this point as well, since Peter did not join in with her

nostalgia, and thinks of how Peter is “Always making one feel, too, frivolous; empty-

minded; a mere silly chatterbox” (65). Both brought low, the battle becomes overt.

Clarissa retorts, Woolf writes,

‘Well, and what’s happened to you?’ she said. So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him.... ‘Millions of things!’ he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him the feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being rushed through the air on the shoulders of people he could no longer see, he raised his hands to his forehead. (66)

Peter has the courage, at this point, to tell Clarissa that he is in love. Clarissa doesn’t

know what to do with this information: in her thoughts she first scoffs at such a

notion—‘That he at his age should be sucked under in his little bow-tie by that monster!”

(67)—and then is made forlorn by it: “He has that, she felt; he is in love” (67). Clarissa

feels jealous; Clarissa feels bereft Yet Peter feels vulnerable. Both believe they have

lost. When Peter gets out his weapon again, his pocket-knife, Clarissa is able to rally at

the sight: “For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in

irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his weakness” (69). Peter tries

to keep up his defiance, thinking, “I know all that...I know what I’m up against” (69),

but he breaks down: Peter cries. And since Clarissa can now afford to be gracious, she

graciously kisses him.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. But then Garissa deflates her own power by thinking, “If I had married him, this

gaiety would have been mine all day! J i t was aM over f°r her. The sheet was stretched

and the bed narrow” (70). In her thoughts, Garissa calls out “Richard, Richard!”, yet

then remembers he is independently lunching with Lady Bruton. Lost, then, Garissa

needs the triumvirate and turns to Peter, inwardly proposing, ‘Take me with you” (70).

Ever the warrior, Garissa composes herself and walks over to Peter. Watching her do

so, Peter thinks “And it was awfully strange.. .how she still had the power, as she came

tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room” (71). Peter tries to

wrestle this power away from Garissa, and turns to use their triangle as a weapon:

“‘Tell me,’ he said, seizing her by the shoulders. ‘Are you happy, Garissa? Does

Richard—’ JThe door opened” (71). Garissa sees her chance for escaping from what

has suddenly become an uncomfortable one-on-one: she happily pounces on the

newcomer, her daughter, Elizabeth: “‘Here is my Elizabeth,’ said Garissa, emotionally,

histrionically, perhaps” (71). Defeated—for there is no Peter-Garissa-young daughter

triangle—Peter makes his escape and runs outside. It is an emotionally exhausting battle

for Peter and for Garissa. Garissa wins, though, and she does so by expertly surfing the

waves of the shifting power dynamic; although often flummoxed, Garissa ultimately

knows when to bring in Richard to use their mdnage k trois to her advantage. With Peter

around, Garissa’s marriage has extra facets; she uses Peter and his feelings for her to

escape from the binary of husband and wife. Garissa skillfully navigates the love

triangle.

There is another factor—besides Garissa’s not choosing him—that works against

Peter Walsh in the Garissa-Peter-Richard triangle: he does the work of empire in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. colonies. Richard works for England, but his doing so at home as a member of

parliament seems only to add gloss to his patina. For instance, when Peter sees Clarissa

after a long absence, he notices Richard’s influence on her, which he describes as being

“a great deal of the public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit”

(116). In contrast to Hugh Whitbread’s symbolism of the sillier aspects of the British

fa9ade, Lady Bruton “preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was made of much

finer material” (157). Lady Bruton gets Richard to advise her, and Milly Bmsh considers

him “always so dependable; such a gentleman too” (162). Woolf creates Richard as

“being pertinacious and dogged, having championed the down-trodden and followed his

instincts in the House of Commons” (175), and although he is “rather speechless, rather

stiff,” he also has surprising moments of political liberalism, such as when he thinks,

“and prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn’t in them, nor in young men either, but in our

detestable social system and so forth” (175). Like Clarissa, he cannot quite be pigeon

holed, and one gets the distinct impression that Richard, although stodgy, does good

work.

In contrast to this, Peter is presented as a failure, one who, when his name comes

up at Lady Bruton’s luncheon, makes everyone smile and think of “some flaw in his

character” (162). What is consequential about these alleged short-comings of Peter’s is

that they are usually connected to his work in India. Where Richard’s work in England

is seen by some as cause for admiration, Peter’s work in the colonies is cause for slightly

embarrassed scorn. He is sullied in the eyes of Garissa’s London circle by his

connection to the colonies. Regarding the homosocial triangle in E. M. Forster’s A

Passage To India, Sara Suleri writes that “In place of the orientalist paradigm in which

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the colonizing presence is as irredeemably male as the colonized territory is female, A

Passage To India presents an alternative colonial model: the most urgent cross-cultural

invitations occur between male and male, with racial difference serving as a substitute

for gender” (133). Woolf is similarly devising such a model in Mrs Dalloway. only

instead of replacing gender with the issue of racial difference, Woolf has Peter acquire a

negative effeminacy from his contact with the female colonized territory; thus tainted, he

becomes the weak rival in the triangle and loses clout both with Clarissa, his desired, and

Richard, his competitor. “He was the best judge of cooking in India” (237), and whereas

this makes “him attractive to women who liked the sense that he was not altogether

manly,” it does not impress the likes of Garissa and Richard. As Suleri contends for

Forster “Geography thus functions as a cultural determinant.. .and as a consequence

becomes a figure for the inefficacy of colonial travel, whether it be across acceptable

cultural or sexual borders” (146). Peter’s geographical decision to do empire work

results from his own sexual disappointment (Clarissa’s choice of Richard) while

simultaneously affecting his sexual desirability, which is lessened by his becoming an

Anglo-Indian. In this manner, Woolf suggests that there is an understated dishonor

connected to work in the colonies; the cultural opinion regarding empire is shifting.

The amount of negative connections made between Peter and his work in India is

overwhelming. Although Clarissa is always remembering Peter’s witty “sayings,” his

letters from India “were awfully dull” (4). Garissa, jealous, is horrified to hear that Peter

is married: but she seems most horrified by the fact that “he had married a woman met

on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that!... Never could she

understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nincompoops” (10). Of course on the one hand this is most indicative of Garissa’s own

prejudices; yet on the other hand, his attraction to and attractiveness towards Anglo-

Indian women contaminates Peter. Even his association with such people—partners of

colonial workers—makes Peter’s character suspect Immediately after thinking of Peter

on his way to India, Oarissa declares, “his whole life had been a failure. It made her

angry still” (11). This is a frequent juxtaposition: when Peter tells Clarissa of his

fiancle, she thinks, “What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been fooled

like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying the girl on the boat going

out to India; now the wife of a Major in the Indian Army—thank Heaven she had refused

to marry him!” (68). India seems inextricable from Peter’s wastes and follies, and Woolf

signals these aspects of the British Empire by making the foolish Peter representative of

Empire in the colonies.

When Peter leaves Clarissa’s house, he eventually cheers up, and when he sees

his reflection, asserts “And there he was, this fortunate man, himself,” yet then connects

this fortune to the fact that “All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of

cholera...” (my italics) (72). Clarissa contends that Peter always had trouble

appreciating the Englishness of England: “But Peter—however beautiful the day might

be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink—Peter never saw a thing of all

that” (9). As such, he is immune to the charms of the English pastoral. Yet such a

“quirk” is magnified by his time spent in the colonies. He is “the other” upon his return

to England: “the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the strangeness of

standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him.

What is it? Where am I?” (77-8). London is unrecognizable to him, and what he has

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seen and experienced in the colonies is, in its own way, unrecognizable to people like

Clarissa and Richard. In his own thoughts Peter defends himself, asserting, “For he had

a turn for mechanics; had invented a plough in his district, had ordered wheel-barrows

from England, but the coolies wouldn’t use them, all of which Clarissa knew nothing

about” (73). As other critics have suggested, the refusal of the workers to implement

Peter’s tools makes Peter’s efficacy as an administrator suspect (Phillips 15); however,

Clarissa, as Peter points out, “knew nothing” about any of his colonial activities: it is

almost as if it would be unseemly to hear the details of empire’s work abroad. Peter was

in India, his letters were dull, he is—somehow—even more of a failure upon his return

for no acknowledged reason other than where he has been.

Often, in his own mind at least, Peter’s time abroad adds a positive sense of

mystery to his character. While walking down the streets of London, his recent return

makes him special: “he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed

(landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer” (80); yet even this goes

slightly askew, for when he has these thoughts, Peter is following a woman he spotted on

the street, and is fantasizing that she is encouraging him to do so. His idea of “daring”

seems more like “creepy” to the reader. Peter’s “daring” spirals to being “careless of all

these damned proprieties...respectability and evening parties” (80); in his own tame way

Peter imagines he has “gone native”. He is no Kurtz, of course, there are no heads on

sticks decorating his property, but his propriety has slipped a notch; he was always

skeptical of Clarissa’s hostess abilities and her parties, and now his skepticism can be

blamed on India. Such antagonism does go both ways. When Peter sees Clarissa

sewing, he contrasts her life with his: “here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back

and ail that...” (61). Yet Peter also is disdainful—or at least ambivalent—regarding his

own activities abroad. He is proud of the fact that he descends “from a respectable

Anglo-Indian family which for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a

continent,” yet he also thinks in an aside: “it’s strange...what a sentiment I have about

that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he did” (82). Towards the end of the book,

Peter even undermines his own authority by turning to Richard Dalloway for real

knowledge about India, in a scene where Woolf's two uses of the Oarissa-Richard-Peter

triangle intersect After having decided that he will go to Clarissa’s party after all, he

twice thinks that “he wanted to ask Richard what they were doing in India” and “What

did the Government mean—Richard Dalloway would know—to do about India?” (244).

Peter bears the taint of empire while Richard has the authority over it Woolf has Peter

always be Richard’s inferior. Because of his love for Clarissa, Peter has a bond with

Richard, making it logical that he would turn to Richard for information and guidance.

That Richard is the doyen in matters pertaining to India, however, is indicative of the

stigma that certain affairs of empire were acquiring.

Clarissa is part of another triangle with Peter which is also concerned with

marriage. Before Richard Dalloway arrived at Bourton, Clarissa, Peter and Sally Seton

were experiencing a summer which Clarissa uses as a marvelous touchstone throughout

the entire novel. Clarissa is fueled by these particular memories of times shared with

Peter and Sally. Significantly, she returns to no such memory of Richard. In “Rewriting

Family Ties: Woolf's Renaissance Romance,” Diana Henderson notes that “What

Clarissa need not live is the romance material that Woolf wants to reconceive, to revive

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in a way that does not subdue female subjectivity. The solution would not be to return to

the old bourgeois one-and-only-love and marriage plot” (150). Clarissa returns, instead,

to the triangle; but unlike the triangle she shares with Peter and Richard—in which she

always chooses to turn a twosome into a threesome—in this instance Clarissa desires yet

fails to remain an exclusive pair with Sally. Peter always intrudes, and Clarissa cannot

forgive him for it. The dynamics of this triangle reveal the strength and pressures of the

traditional marriage plot; Woolf has the tensions between Clarissa, Sally, and Peter

illustrate just what Clarissa is up against with regards to the marriage plot of her own

life.

While reminiscing about Bourton, Clarissa thinks of how she was so in love with

Sally Seton that “Peter Walsh might have been there,” but she does not know for sure:

she was only, and blissfully, aware of Sally. Clarissa continues on to remember “the

most exquisite moment of her whole life,” which is when Sally Seton kisses her on the

lips (52). It is at this moment that the unfortunate Peter chooses to make the two into

three, and interrupts their kiss with an inane question. Clarissa avows that this

interruption “was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was

shocking; it was horrible!” (53). In love with Clarissa himself, Peter of course interrupts

on purpose with “his determination to break into their companionship” (53). Clarissa can

never forgive Peter for this; and one wonders whether she punishes Peter for it by later

forcing him to always be the third who interrupts her marriage to Richard. It is

interesting, however, that Woolf never presents Sally’s view of this interrupted kiss. For

Sally seems quite fond of Peter, and the two of them have many connections. To begin

with, Clarissa’s father dislikes them both, which, as Peter points out, “was a great bond”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (90). Secondly, Sally is Peter’s advocate: she wants Clarissa to marry him. Her motives

are not clear perhaps she knows that there is a secure emotional place for her in a Peter-

Clarissa marriage; or perhaps she just does not like Richard. At any rate, when they are

young, Sally writes to Peter all summer confiding in him how much Clarissa likes him:

“how they had talked of him; how she had praised him, how Clarissa burst into tears”

(95). Later, Peter thinks of how Sally had “implored him, half laughing of course, to

carry off Oarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the Dalloways and all the other

‘perfect gentlemen’ who would ‘stifle her soul’” (114). When Peter and Sally meet up at

Clarissa’s party, she repeats these sentiments, even though she herself has long been

absent from Clarissa’s life. She asks Peter, “to be quite frank then, how could Clarissa

have done it?—married Richard Dalloway?” (288). Sally has forgiven Peter for that

interruption; the two of them derive comfort from remembering a pre-Richard Dalloway

Clarissa. They both represent and reveal the limitations of the choices available to

Clarissa. For when Sally makes the claim that “Clarissa had cared for him [Peter] more

than she had ever cared for Richard. Sally was positive of that” (293-3), the reader

knows that Clarissa had cared for Sally even more.

Clarissa herself prioritizes the triangle she forms with Peter and Sally at her party.

She looks at Peter and Sally chatting, and acknowledges that they have significantly

shaped her past more than Richard has done. Henderson writes that “the return of

Clarissa’s long ‘lost’ sibling surrogates (her youthful loves Peter Walsh and Sally Seton)

challenges the centrality of the conventional marriage plot that led Clarissa away from

those friends to become Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (137). Clarissa shared with Sally the

one pairing that she did not want to be anything but* it was a twosome she loved, but

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which could not withstand the conventional marriage expectations. As Henderson

enables us to see, however, Woolf does use the Garissa-Peter-Sally triangle as a means

of subverting the “centrality of the conventional marriage plot,” and she does so right up

to the last page of the book. Peter and Sally keep punctuating their conversation by

asking where is Garissa? They need her to complete their triangle. When she does

return to the party, Sally once again pleads Peter’s case: by going to talk to Richard

Dalloway, she leaves Peter and Garissa together to share the final moment of the novel.

This prevents its ending with Garissa joining her husband and daughter in what would

have been the conventional marriage plot portrait.

Whereas Garissa derives a kind of soothing, nostalgic comfort from her

memories of her interactions with Sally and Peter, the comfort she gets from the tense

connections between herself, her daughter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s tutor, Doris

Kilman, is antagonistic in nature. Garissa despises Miss Kiiman, and despises the allure

she holds for Elizabeth; however, this negative energy seems to recharge Garissa. She

flourishes upon it and will return to Miss Kilman in mind when Miss Kilman is not

present in body. Before Miss Kilman appears in the novel, Garissa reminisces for a

moment about the tutor she had as a youth, a “Fraulein Daniels” (11). We learn later that

Miss Kilman, too, is of German descent, so it could be that Garissa—ever one to mix the

present with the past—is recalling or re-living an old antagonism she felt towards this

Fraulein Daniels, who gave Garissa only “a few twigs of knowledge” (11). However,

like so many of Garissa’s interactions, she actively triangulates this one: the issue

becomes not her dislike for Miss Kilman, but how this dislike for Miss Kilman will

enable her to participate in a power struggle against Miss Kilman for Elizabeth’s

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. affections. Garissa’s first reference to Miss Kilman is to express her annoyance that

Elizabeth likes and is taken in by her. In the triangle Garissa creates with Richard and

Peter, because she has genuine feelings for both men, the power struggle between the

three of them that she so relishes must remain somewhat under the surface, taking second

place to her affection for both men. She has no such affection for Miss Kilman, so the

power struggle aspect is as obvious to Garissa as her power struggle with Richard and

Peter is to the reader it is overt. Woolf has Garissa begin to list some of the small

details that annoy her about Miss Kilman, but she soon abandons them to get to the heart

of the matter

For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered into itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those specters with which one battles in the night.. .for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No. (16-17)

But in a way, Garissadoes love Miss Kilman: she loves to hate her. Such a tension

between two people over a third is Garissa’s existential crux, and when she goes on to

describe how such hatred rocks the foundation of her world, one cannot help but think

that there is a part of Garissa that is positively fueled by this negative energy. Such

hunches are confirmed at the end of the novel, when, at a low point at her party, and

when Garissa is despairing of it ever coalescing into a triumphant event, she cheers

herself up by thinking, “Kilman her enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how

she hated her—hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s seducer; the

woman who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard would say, What nonsense!). She

hated her; she loved her. It was enemies one wanted, not friends...” (265-6). Garissa

wants someone who will both torment her and come to her rescue. Woolf specifically

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. makes Garissa drawn to those who will allow the binaries to be blurred: she can both

love and hate Miss Kilman, she can have a marriage with Richard that allows in—and

indeed depends upon—other people. Trudi Tate avers that “The struggle between

Garissa and Miss Kilman over Elizabeth’s affection, for example, can never be resolved

so that both are satisfied or victorious. Towards the end of the novel Garissa recognizes

this, and relishes her discovery of the power struggle” (154). It is this more complex

power struggle inherent in a threesome that Garissa so desires.

Miss Kilman is not the only phantom at Garissa’s party, for it is, of course,

Septimus’s absence that becomes the party’s core. Garissa, Miss Kilman, and Septimus

form another significant threesome. Karen Levenback makes a persuasive case for

seeing the integral role Miss Kilman plays in the novel as being of equal consequence to

the oft-noted role of Septimus. She observes that ‘To isolate Septimus Smith as the

doppelganger of Garissa Dalloway is to miss the importance of Doris Kilman, for ‘Miss

Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway’; she understood Mrs. Dalloway and her limitations

all too well” (80). Indeed the similarities between the three characters often overlap.

Miss Kilman, for example, seems to relish the power struggle between herself and

Garissa over Elizabeth as much as Garissa does: she wants “to overcome her; to

unmask her” (189). Like Garissa, Miss Kilman first professes hatred towards her and

then clarifies that to hating the idea of Garissa and what she represents (189). Where

Garissa pushes thoughts of Miss Kilman temporarily out of her head with declarations of

“Nonsense, nonsense” (17), Miss Kilman pushes thoughts of Garissa out of her head by

thinking “of Russia” (195). Like Garissa, Miss Kilman uses a third person in their

power struggle. She thinks, “At any rate she had got Elizabeth” (195), showing that she

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. knows full well the shape of their battle. Miss Kilman uses Elizabeth as a pawn, and

when Elizabeth leaves her, thinks, “She had gone. Mrs. Dalloway had triumphed” (201).

Without that third person Miss Kilman knows the combustion will fizzle.

Miss Kilman and Septimus Warren Smith are even more alike. Both are from the

lower classes; both were working their way up before the war, and then had the war

interfere with and disrupt their upward mobility. As Gay Wachman contends, “InMrs

Dalloway, only Septimus and Doris Kilman oppose the postwar, ruling-class values

embodied in the Dalloways and their essentially exploitative colonialist circle” (123).

Both—Septimus in his overcoat and Miss Kilman in her green mackintosh—are now

shabby. People look at Miss Kilman and wonder if there is something wrong with her, as

they occasionally do with Septimus: a clerk sees Miss Kilman “muttering” to herself in

the Army and Navy stores, and “the girl serving thought her mad” (196). Kilman’s

“fanatical religious zeal. ..begins at about the same time as Septimus’s aberrational

behavior became manifest” (Levenback 80). In “The Female Victims of the War inMrs

Dalloway” Masami Usui makes the point that “The bond between Septimus and Clarissa

should be understood as a common sense of victimization by the war and by patriarchal

values” (151). If this is true for the bond between Septimus and Clarissa, then it is even

more so for the bond between Septimus and Doris Kilman. Miss Kilman’s life

circumstances were completely derailed by the war she lost her job and with it her sole

means for supporting herself. And as Usui herself goes on to contend, “Womanhood was

still valued and judged by men” and so “Kilman’s lack of beauty, money and social

status symbolize a deeply rooted patriarchal view of a single, independent, and strong

woman without social rank” (161). Kilman is smart enough to make this connection for

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. herself: “’I’m plain, I’m unhappy’” (MD 200 and Usui 162). Her physical looks cause

her to be a victim whom no one will rescue.

“Patriarchal values” do give Septimus at least one advantage over Miss Kilman.

When Woolf describes Septimus’s background, we see that Septimus is employed by Mr.

Brewer, a man who, in the old boy manner, looks out for Septimus’s well-being. He sees

potential in Septimus and can envision him advancing to the company’s higher echelons

“‘if he keeps his health’ said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger—he looked weakly;

advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way to consider

recommending a rise of salary,” yet at this point Septimus thwarts him by enlisting (129).

After the war, when Septimus’s shell-shock begins to manifest itself, Mr. Brewer kindly

gives him a leave of absence and writes him a glowing letter of recommendation which

Septimus shows to the doctor. Of course in the long run, this supportive network is not

enough to save Septimus; however, it stands in great contrast to Miss Kilman’s

employment experience. Woolf explains: “And then, just as she might have had a

chance at Miss Dolby’s school, the war came; and she had never been able to tell lies.

Miss Dolby thought she would be happier with people who shared her views about the

Germans. She had had to go” (187). Although Miss Kilman later has the “good fortune”

to meet Richard Dalloway, who pities her and hires her as Elizabeth’s tutor, as a woman

who must support herself, her value in the patriarchy comes to an unceremonious end.

She is its victim in a way that Septimus is not—although there are other ways of viewing

Miss Kilman besides as a merely pitiable character. As Wachman asserts: “Socialist,

pacifist, and a lesbian historian, Kilman plays an important role as an outsider, opposing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. with her solitary feminist consciousness the structures of the patriarchy in Woolf5 s

reconfigured history of the aftermath of the First World War” (137).

Although a large portion of Mrs Dalloway consists of Clarissa being haunted by

the ghosts of her past at Bourton, as readers we are forced to make a distinction between

her ghosts and all the many times that Septimus Warren Smith is haunted by seeing

visions of his friend, Evans, who was killed in the war. Septimus is insane and Clarissa is

sane, and as Woolf noted in her diary, Mrs Dalloway is to be a study of just such a

pairing; this is the most common way of interpreting the novel. Commenting on

Septimus's shell-shock-induced insanity, John Mepham explains that Septimus “sees

only two possibilities—meaning is everywhere or it is nowhere; our experience is full or

it is empty; excitation or desolation. This way lies insanity” (150). Claire Tylee views

Septimus and Clarissa as being linked by their imperial restraints. She writes that ‘The

novel plots their mutual constraint by the values of an imperial political system” (150).

Karen Levenback connects this directly to the binaries of war, clarifying that Septimus

“returns unable to read Shakespeare, in whom he sees evidence of the same either-or,

life-denying vision that is concomitant with war” (74). Sane, Clarissa does not view life

in such an extremely bifurcated manner; Clarissa can see both sides of an issue. She can

see Septimus's death as—for her at least—both a tragedy and a choice. But Woolf has

more going on here than merely counteracting Septimus’s insanity with Clarissa’s sanity.

Septimus and Clarissa are paired, but as Woolf wrote in the other diary entry already

quoted, “I can bring innumerable other characters to her support”(Volume Two 272). In

doing so, she successfully blurs the borderline between the either/or of Septimus’s

insanity and Clarissa’s sanity, thus mirroring the possibility of how all such simplistic

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. binaries can and should be made more complex. Therefore, where on the one hand

Garissa’s “‘use’ of Septimus to sustain her own spirit replicates the nation’s recent use of

many such naively patriotic young clerks in the war—destroying them to sustain an

idealized image of English duty and nationhood” (Henderson 151), on the other hand

Woolf writes a way out of the simple thinking that so often is part and parcel of the

“image of English duty and nationhood” by having Garissa turn to other characters as

well—and indeed always insist upon bringing in these other characters. Woolf therefore

has Garissa at her party use both the idea of Miss Kilman and Septimus’s suicide to

reach her own epiphany. And when the image of Miss Kilman fades with the immediacy

of the shock of Septimus’s death, it is not long before Garissa once again will make a

twosome into a threesome by bringing the old woman across the street into her thoughts

of herself and Septimus. As she had once used her view of the everyday of the woman in

the house across the street to calm her feelings against Miss Kilman (191-2), so she does

again with the turmoil she feels over Septimus’s suicide. Garissa is despairing at the

comparison she makes between herself and Septimus: “Somehow it was her

disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there

a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.

She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable” (282). But then

Garissa notes the woman across the street: “She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but

how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!” (283). This is

the first time that the old woman has interacted with Garissa by returning and sharing her

gaze. Garissa is not “alone” with Septimus; she now no longer forms a pair with

Septimus, but a trio with him and the old woman across the street Either/or has been

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. thwarted: “But what an extraordinary night!” (2S3). Clarissa then turns and returns to

the party in general, and to a different triumvirate in particular “She must find Sally and

Peter” (284). Pairs will dissolve as she moves from three to three.

The many character triangles that Clarissa is a part of connect with many of the

specific political points and opinions Virginia Woolf is known to have professed. One

aspect of Woolf’s project in Mrs Dalloway is to create an awareness of the negative

effects of the simple binaries that proliferated during World War I. She had long been a

vocal critic of the rigid social and cultural distinctions that accompanied the gender

binary, having experienced the educational limitations that were imposed on women

firsthand when her brothers went off to acquire an education at school that Woolf had to

acquire on her own at home. What Woolf does in Mrs Dalloway, however, is to set it in

1924—a time close enough after the war for the us/them propaganda binaries expounded

during it to still be culturally present—and then to make the connection between these

binaries of war, both with the same us/them binaries upon which the British Empire is

based,and the dangerous simplicities of the gender binary. Of course, nothing is as

simple as us/them and him/her, and one of the techniques which Woolf uses to make this

point is to always bring a third person into Garissa’s relations. As we have seen, the

Dalloways’ version of husband-and-wife always becomes husband-and-wife-and-Peter.

Garissa even chooses to marry Richard Dalloway because she knows that with him she

will have this kind of leeway: “For in marriage a little license, a little independence there

must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard

gave her and she him.. .But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. And it was intolerable” (10). Yet Garissa chooses to view the independence Richard

gives her through this possessiveness of Peter’s: one is not complete without the other,

and Garissa seems to need the tension that exists between the two.

This extension of the boundaries of the traditional male/female relationship is

indicative of how Woolf believes the false binaric constructs that make up war and

empire should be similarly complicated and dismantled. Kathy J. Phillips writes of how

“One of [Woolf’s] most interesting juxtapositions associates Empire making, war

making, and gender relations in a typical constellation” (vii). The example Phillips

proceeds to use is taken fromJacob's Room, the novel Woolf wrote before Mrs

Dalloway. Although Woolf began her formulation of this triangular “constellation” in

Jacob's Room, it is in Mrs Dalloway that it really becomes a central pattern; as such, it is

one that Garissa will replicate in all of her relations and interactions throughout the book.

As William Handley points out, “Woolf is interested not in fixing human beings but in

unhinging them, in demonstrating how individuals are constantly impinged upon by

social forces that shape their internal reality” (112). If this is true, then how Woolf has

her individuals navigate these social forces can be seen as her proposed answer to the

problems which the restraints of these forces impose. In Mrs Dalloway, Garissa is

always able to better understand herself and her interactions with others by subverting the

traditional binaric relations and constantly bringing a third person into the mix. By

showing Garissa gaining insight from and making things better for herself by changing a

simple two to a more complicated three, Woolf thus is able to hint at the benefits that

would also be attained by similarly complicating the simple binaries of empire and war.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The problem with a binary is that all the power inevitably ends up on one side of

it A powerful us needs a weak them to remain powerful. The enemy in a war needs to

be “bad” so that one’s own country can be “good”. Man needs woman to be the weak

other. As Woolf so aptly and sarcastically phrases it in A Room of One’s Own, “Women

have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious

power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (35). Characteristically,

Woolf then proceeds to connect this disparity of gender to war and empire, commenting

that:

Without that power...The glories of all our wars would be unknown...The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn their crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, minors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. (AROO 35-6)

As stated previously, adding a third person, side or angle can block the magnification the

powerless give to the powerful, for an interrupted binary is more easily dismanded when

middle ground creates more room for maneuvering. Gilles Deleuze claims this space for

Virginia Woolf direcdy when he writes that ‘The only way to get outside the dualisms is

to be-between, to pass between the intermezzo—that is what Virginia Woolf lived with

all her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become” (126). He elaborates upon

this by asserting that “It is the middle where one finds the becoming, the movement, the

velocity, the vortex. The middle is not the mean, but on the contrary an excess. It is by

the middle that things push. That was Virginia Woolfs idea” (206). Phillips takes a

similar approach to Woolf when she points out that Woolf often “focuses on the lowly,”

having, for example, the cook comment on the prime minister’s appearance at Clarissa’s

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. party, and that “She does so not to give exhaustive evidence from the foreground of

social conditions, but to orient the gaze, through juxtaposition and metaphor, toward the

background links among Empire, military, and gender relations, which together

constitute a comprehensive imperial ideology” (xxix). By adding a third “channel” or

route for power to pass through, Woolf magnifies this “middle” which Deleuze refers to,

and the “background links” referred to by Phillips: the triangle structure she usesMrs in

Dalloway, then, interferes with the way that power is traditionally maintained and

recharged. The triangle of characters exposes a more complex pattern of shifting

allegiances which can also work to undermine the binaries of gender, war, and empire:

triangulated, their inter-relatedness is revealed.

In her diaries written during the war, Woolf's commentary often proves how

aware she was of the machinations of the propaganda of wan how it simplified all

outlooks, paring all issues down to that of us vs. them and good vs. evil, thus making war

more compelling. She writes that ‘The Northcliffe papers do all they can to insist upon

the indispensability & delight of war. They magnify our victories to make our mouths

water for more” {Volume One 200). Yet she also reveals how persuasive such

propaganda can be, discovering that she herself was not always immune to the fervor it

produced. In an entry for March 14,1918, Woolf quips that,

What excited me was the evening paper.... [I] read that the Prime Minister needed our prayers. We were faced with momentous decisions. We Britons must cling together. In a week or even a few days facts must be faced which would change the British Empire for ever. We evolved from this an offer of peace to France: but it appears to be only LG’s way of whipping up his gallery. Anyhow, I was whipped. {Volume One 128)

In this passage she mockingly acts out her “proper” role as receiver of propaganda: she

self-consciously reacts the way she is supposed to react. But of course Woolf knows to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. distrust the simplicity of the views put forth. Woolf does not necessarily see the war as

an aberration disconnected from what came before or will come after. As Kathy Phillips

points out, “Woolf consistently depicts the perpetuation of this dangerous ideology

through the British public schools, universities, social classes, churches,

professions...marriage and gender expectations. These institutions all reinforce each

other, so that a unifying imperial outlook regulates life at home and dictates behavior

overseas” (221). Thus, when the war ends, Woolf does not see cause for celebration: all

the institutions that created the war are still in place. Phillips points out that World War I

“is presented in all Woolf’s books not as an anomaly or an external threat to British

society, but rather as its inevitable result” (1). It follows, therefore, that in her diary

Woolf refuses to see the peace celebrations as anything other than slightly pathetic and

meant for those who have been seduced by the war’s propaganda. She notes that even

the celebrations are divided by a binary: “there seemed to be no mean between tipsy

ribaldry & rather sour disapproval” ( Volume One 217). Writing about a more formal

celebration that occurred a few months later, Woolf grumbles that “One ought to say

something about Peace day, I suppose, though whether it’s worth taking a new nib for

that purpose I don’t know,” and later she clarifies her disdain, pointing out that ‘There’s

something calculated & politic & insincere about these peace rejoicings”(Volume One

292). Viewing the war as a contained eruption with the Peace Day celebrations acting as

the period to its sentence does not work for Woolf. She will explore this uneasiness in

her novels. As Karen Levenback contends in her book, Virginia Woolfand the Great

War, Woolf’s postwar novels “reveal the author’s engagement with ambiguities and

realities that blur the lines between peace and war; civilians and combatants; survivors

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and victims; and, most basically, life and death” (27). It is Woolfs project to “blur the

lines” of these binaries.

Woolf sees the gender binary as being part and parcel of the binaries of war and

empire. Each creates simplistic divisions that work to uphold the power of one side. As

Phillips describes, Woolf thought that “Churchgoers’ practice in believing that men are

better than women prepares them to accept other hierarchies, such as ‘England is better

than Germany’ or ‘our navy is better than your navy’” (131).2 Although in 1938 when

writing Three Guineas, Woolf will infer that “feminine discourse encourages an erosion

of boundaries, permitting a collaboration betweenyou and us rather than the absorption

of us by you” (Hanley 58), in Mrs Dalloway Woolfs view is more understated. Trudi

Tate elaborates upon this inModernism, History and the First World War. “Who was to

blame for the disaster of the war, and who would take responsibility for the peace?

Woolf does not simply criticize men and exonerate women, as some critics have

suggested; rather, her writing directs both satire and sympathy in complex and

unexpected ways” (151-2). Tate claims that one of the ways Woolf does this is to make

Clarissa “a strongly paradoxical figure. The text constructs her quite explicitly as

someone with whom we are invited to sympathize and whom we are forced to judge”

(167). Practically nothing or no one in Mrs Dalloway remains in its comer of the box, so

to speak. Septimus’s damage from the war is paralleled with Clarissa’s patriarchal

constrictions—despite the fact that Garissa herself often takes refuge in these

constrictions. Clarissa will feel sorry for the suffering of Lady Bexborough, who lost her

son in the war, and for Septimus, but feels nothing but antipathy towards Miss Kilman’s

war misfortunes, and indifference regarding the carnage suffered by the Armenians—a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. people whose fate Richard Dalloway has some control over. Woolf thus even wants her

readers’ opinions of Clarissa Dalloway to occupy a middle space: even the binary of like

and dislike will be thwarted.

Kathy J. Phillips’ Virginia Woolf against Empire was the first book-length study

of the prominent role that empire plays in Woolf's novels. But critics before and since

have theorized about Woolf's interest in and opinions regarding empire, war, and gender

in general, and in how they unfurl inMrs Dalloway in particular. Many have used the

connection between Garissa and Septimus as an entry into such a discussion. Trudi Tate

claims that Woolf makes the point of how much the war effected the average London

citizen if Clarissa, a civilian, can have so much in common with Septimus, a shell

shocked soldier (147). Karen Levenback adds to this line of thought by commenting that

“What she came to see progressively in the war years proper was that the civilian

experience of the war was no less real for being inherently ironic and that the facts of life

thereafter would be measured against the experience of the war whether on the front or

on the streets or in the village” (16). Diana Henderson expands this civilian/soldier

connection beyond the war, arguing that Mrs Dalloway “tries to expose the particular

social structures that limit the lives of women and nonelite men, associating oppression

with the workings of empire and patriarchy” (144). In doing so she shows how many of

the points made about war inMrs Dalloway also hold true for empire and gender

relations in that novel as well. The connection between Clarissa and Septimus works as

a good first step towards uncovering the pervasiveness of the effects of the

“constellation” of empire, war, and gender relations, but escalating this examination from

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the one significant doubling in the novel to the multiple significant triumvirates will

enable us to uncover even more.

In his essay, ‘“We All Put Up With You Virginia’: Irreceivable Wisdom about

War,” Roger Poole avows that “There is a case for regarding Mrs Dalloway as the finest

‘war novel’ that World War I produced” (79). He maintains that in addition to the

connection between Clarissa and Septimus, war has a constant presence inMrs

Dalloway, in fact, he goes so far as to claim that its “absence” is also significant, and that

Woolf is commenting on war when she has so many of her characters shy away from

thoughts of it (Poole 80). Other critics concur Nancy Bazin and Jane Lauter assert that

‘To read Virginia Woolf’s fiction intelligently, the reader must recognize fully the extent

to which war shaped her vision and the reasons why it had such an impact” (14), while

William Handley suggests that “Woolf’s aesthetic project.. .is a fighting response to the

war, to the hierarchical structure, culture, and rigid psychology of a society that pulls

itself toward this destructive end” (111). Mark Hussey extends such assertions to

WoolTs entire oeuvre, declaring that “all Woolf’s work is deeply concerned with war;

that it helps redefine our understanding of the nature of war; and that from her earliest to

her final work she sought to explore and make clear the connections between private and

public violence, between the domestic and the civic effects of patriarchal society,

between male supremacy and the absence of peace, and between ethics and aesthetics”

(3). And finally, Karen Levenback effectively encapsulates these sentiments when she

writes that “In fact, any effort to assess WoolT s writings or her life without a sense of

her experience of the Great War is as incomplete as it would be in a study of Robert

Graves, for example, who was a combatant, or D. H. Lawrence, who, like the Woolfs,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. remained a civilian” (4). The consensus is that Mrs Dalloway is a war novel and

Virginia Woolf a war novelist: she captures how on a day in June of 1924, the war is still

very much a part of everyone’s everyday.

By constantly weaving the war into such a seemingly post-war sunny June day is

precisely how Woolf emphasizes that when it comes to the Great War there is no “over”.

She immediately establishes this contradiction on the third page of the novel by having

Garissa muse:

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. (5)

After Garissa proclaims in that passage that “The War was over,” she immediately gives

the lie to this by listing several of the ways in which it is not over. Clarissa herself might

not have lost a family member in the war—although her Uncle William’s death seems at

least emotionally connected to the war, being described as “He had turned on his bed one

morning in the middle of the War. He had said, ‘I have had enough’” (15)—but she is

surrounded by people who have experienced such losses. Such contradictions continue

throughoutMrs Dalloway. Garissa even contradicts herself before she reaches the

flower shop that is the destination of her morning walk; she thinks that, “This late age of

the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears

and sorrows; courage and endurance, a perfectly upright and stoical bearing” (13). It is

not just Garissa—a woman for whom the past is always very much present—who is

preoccupied with the war: it seems to pervade the minds of everybody in London. A

“Little Mr. Bowley” looks at some women and thinks, “poor women, nice little children,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. orphans, widows, the War—tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes” (28). Mr. Brewer,

Septimus’s boss, remarks upon how his business has been affected by the war, “so prying

and insidious were the fingers of the European War” (129). Even the complacent

Richard Dalloway thinks, when he is walking across London to tell Clarissa he loves her,

that “Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all

their lives before them, shoveled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle” (174).

Septimus—for whom, of course, the war is overtly ever-present—carries its presence to

extremes. He hallucinates how “The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the

orchids. There they waited till the War was over...” (105). Dead and alive are still

waiting for the war’s “ending.” But one cannot dismiss Septimus’s feelings about the

war as being a result of his shell-shock, for Woolf has all young men—even the sane

ones—appear to be on a hair-trigger where war is concerned. When the gray car

containing the unknown representative of the British Empire passes, Woolf writes of

how “Tall men,” “men of robust physique,” and “well-dressed men” “stood even

straighter, and removed their hands, and seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need

be, to the cannon’s mouth, as their ancestors had done before them” (26). If war is

indeed “over,” it certainly seems easy to begin it again.

In other novels, Woolf appears conflicted about the supposed divide between pre

war and post-war times. Josephine Schaefer makes this claim for To The Lighthouse,

maintaining that “Certainly Virginia Woolf was aware of how flawed the prewar

civilization of England was, and in To The Lighthouse she both reflects and rejects

nostalgia for that world that lies irrecoverably on the other side of the Great War” (145).

In Mrs Dalloway, however, such a notion is a binary to which she will not adhere. She

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. even seems to mock the tenor of such thinking by having Clarissa comment that “before

the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves” (15). By connecting the pre-war mindset

to this trivial example of gloves instead of to the more expected concept of a pre-war

innocence, Woolf insinuates an underlying continuity: there is no pre-war and post-war,

in part because war is a natural extension of the long established political and social

culture of England.

In the same year that Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway, she also wrote the essay

“Thunder at Wembley,” in which she observes a storm raining upon the Empire

Exhibition at Wembley Stadium and the procession leading up to it. Literally, therefore,

it is raining on empire’s parade, and Woolf clearly uses the exhibition as a symbol for the

British Empire itself. This Empire Exhibition was “first proposed in 1913, but postponed

because of the war and turned into a demonstration of the Empire’s strength and

resources after the ordeal of war...” (Joll 180). Woolf addresses this pageantry,

recognizing empire’s imminent demise in this attempt to disguise its newly precarious

state. In purple prose, Woolf observes that “Colonies are perishing and dispersing in

spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash

and violet are the colours of its decay. The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing;

the Exhibition is in ruins. For that is what comes of letting in the sky” (186-7). The sky,

here, is making the sun never setting on the British Empire a moot point. Woolf displays

a similar awareness of empire’s dissolution inMrs Dalloway. Like war, an awareness of

empire appears repeatedly in the everyday consciousness of the London civilians.

Significantly, it is the dilapidation of empire upon which the characters usually remark.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. To be fair, there are moments in Mrs Dalloway where empire is mentioned or

thought of without reference to its demise. Garissa, for example, finds it reassuring to

think of the King and Queen being “at the Palace” where they should be, signaling how

everything is right in her world (6). Often, however, what starts out to be a positive

reference to empire will go strangely awry. As the gray car passes through the gates of

Buckingham Palace, the people feel a thrill of patriotism which begins seriously enough,

yet turns silly. Woolf writes of how they “all the time let rumour accumulate in their

veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of Royalty looking at them; the

Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed

upon Kings...” (27). This list, which begins with the rather strange visceral location of

the thrill experienced, deteriorates from the onlookers being thrilled at the thought of the

Queen inside the car to being thrilled by “the Queen’s old doll’s house” and the Prince’s

newly acquired slim figure (27-8). One cannot help but hear the mocking in WoolTs

tone.

Furthermore, such more or less “neutral” references to empire are far out

numbered by moments where empire appears pathetic and askew. To begin with, the

fact that the identity of the person in the gray car is so uncertain seems significant. When

Woolf writes that “nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of

Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew” (20),

such anonymity for the head of the British Empire stands in contrast to Queen Victoria’s

marked presence as monarch during the empire’s heyday. A few pages later, Woolf

again mentions the anonymity of the person in the car and this time takes the symbolism

of decay even further. For she begins by writing of how the people who watch the car

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. are experiencing a brush with greatness, so to speak; however, she continues by

proclaiming that they are

within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones.... The face in the motor car will then be known. (23)

What might seem like a tribute on a first reading—the fact that the head of England in

the car will still be known in centuries to come—becomes overshadowed by the passing

reference to London as “a grass-grown path”: what is Woolf saying about the British

Empire by projecting its central city as greenery-covered rubble? One can hardly take it

as a vote of confidence in empire’s ability to remain afloat. And indeed Woolf returns to

such moments of unsettlement In an oft-quoted passage, Woolf writes that even though

the car has passed, the feelings its presence had stirred still remained:

This roiling beneath “the surface” has something to do with empire and the changes that

are occurring to it: thoughts of empire are connected to thoughts of “the dead,” and the

colonies are now speaking back.

Like the car in this scene, an airplane soon follows which Woolf also portrays as

causing its viewers to question the fitness of empire. The plane is spelling out a word

that the people below have trouble reading: its message is not clear to them. Woolf

writes of how “The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved

freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was—a mission of the greatest

importance” (30). The British Empire’s mission has always been one “from West to

East”, yet it is significant that here such movement is for an undefined mission. Its

raison d’etre is no longer clear—and is, perhaps, fading like the letters made out of

cloud; furthermore, reassurance as to its importance seems to be needed—so much so

that its “greatest importance” must be stated twice. Such a need indicates insecurity.

And still the examples pile up: Peter Walsh sees a young regiment marching and at first

notices “on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of

a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England” (76). Yet upon a closer look,

he notes that “they did not look robust. They were weedy for the most part, boys of

sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters”

(76). Their future, like the future of the British Empire, begins to appear bleak. When

Clarissa looks in the shop windows at the pretty things for sale, she sees “the

shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely

old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans...” (6).

Significantly, it is the Americans who have the money to buy the decorations of empire,

and Garissa, whose “people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges” who “must

economise” (6) and must later repair her own sea-green dress. It is not Clarissa’s

ancestors’ British Empire anymore.

Woolf also comments on the state of England and the British Empire by using a

triumvirate of characters that Clarissa is connected to, yet not directly a part of: Helena

Parry, Lady Bruton, and Hugh Whitbread. Aunt Helena lived in Burma and India in the

1860s and 1870s; now, in 1924, she lives in her memories of those days in the colonies,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and seemingly could be a representative of how the British Empire used to be. Aunt

Helena is preoccupied with her own personal memories of life in the colonies: she

remembers the orchids she collected and painted, as well as “herself carried on the backs

of coolies in the ‘sixties over solitary peaks” (271). She is an elderly woman, so it is

perhaps not surprising that she lives now ensconced in her memories of times past

However, it is significant that Woolf specifically makes Helena someone who has

experienced the usual “glory days” of empire, yet has “no tender memories, no proud

illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies,” while at the same time being “fretful” and

“disturbed by the War” (271). Helena thinks nothing of what was presented at the time

as empire’s military triumphs; she does not use them to counteract or hold up against the

military horrors of World War I. Instead, the war interrupts her memories of old Empire,

which have become a watercolor landscape—and even that memory will soon die with

Miss Parry. War causes empire’s memories to dissolve like empire itself.

In contrast to Helena Parry’s watered down memories of empire in the past, Lady

Bruton is very much concerned with empire now. Much is made of Millicent Bruton’s

lineage: she is descended from a long line of generals and Sirs and men who were

involved in the government of England and its colonies. Lady Bruton is not married and

has no children, however, so the line will end with her; and since she is female, she was

not able to follow in the career footsteps of her famous forebears. Woolf writes that “if

ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have led troops to

attach, ruled with indomitable justice barbarian hordes...that woman was Millicent

Bruton” (274-5), yet her gender makes her ineffectual. Lady Bruton is preoccupied with

empire’s present state, but the specifics of her preoccupations do not bode .well for the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. British Empire. When she has Hugh Whitbread and Richard Dalloway over for lunch,

she has them compose a letter for her regarding emigration, her latest cause, which is

described as “that project for emigrating young people of both sexes bom of respectable

parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada” (164). It is

telling that the representative of present-day empire in Mrs Dalloway is concerned

primarily with getting people out of England to a place where they have better chances

for success. The emigration letter-writing at Lady Bruton’s luncheon is interrupted by

the arrival of newspapers—“the news from India!” (168). Such a juxtaposition of the

two issues—Lady Bruton’s frequent switching back and forth from the need for

emigration to India as “a tragedy” (274)—enables the reader to make the connection

between empire and the need to escape from it Again, as the character who is empire’s

champion, Lady Bruton’s naysaying reveals how unstable is the ground on which empire

rests. Even at Clarissa’s party Lady Bruton “had the thought of Empire always at hand”

(275) and manages to speak to the Prime Minister in a private room “about India” (279).

But then Woolf mentions Lady Bruton’s future death, which at that point also seems to

be the death of empire; it is as if Lady Bruton will take England’s heyday with her when

she dies, since she cannot imagine being anything but English, even in death: Woolf

writes that “one could not figure her even in death parted from the earth or roaming

territories over which, in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be

not English even among the dead—no, no! Impossible!” (275). Because of her sex

Lady Bruton cannot accomplish for empire what she would like, and she has no sons

who could do so; as the character most concerned with the British Empire, her status

reveals the Empire to be a dead end.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. If Virginia Woolf means for Helena Parry and Millicent Bruton to be

representatives of the British Empire’s concerns abroad, than Hugh Whitbread is

symbolic of her worst fears of what England has become at home. Hugh is all surface

niceties and empty ritual: he has a kind of court job at Buckingham Palace, but no one is

quite sure what he actually does there. As Clarissa notes, “he was almost too well

dressed always” (7), and he attends functions and social gatherings alone, since his wife

Evelyn is a permanent invalid (7). Like Lady Bruton, he has no children to whom he

will directly pass on his way of life. Woolf writes that “He did not go deeply. He

brushed surfaces; the dead languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris, Rome;

riding, shooting, tennis, it had been once... He had been afloat on the cream of English

society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime Ministers” (155). Hugh represents a

way of life that is changing, but his way is not admirable; again, Hugh is all fa9ade.

Lady Bruton gets Richard Dalloway to advise her about the subject matter, but she has

Hugh help her write her letters, because Hugh is so adept at the language of political

commentary. Although Richard laughs at Hugh’s caution and bombast, Lady Bruton

marvels at how “he began carefully writing capital letters with rings round them in the

margin, and thus marvelously reduced Lady Bruton’s tangles to sense” (166). Woolf

will often make characters think of England and English society, and then think of or see

Hugh. For example, Clarissa runs into Hugh in London right after she thinks of her own

need to economize and contrasts that with the thought that “her people were courtiers

once in the time of the Georges” (6); it is after that thought that she notices Hugh, who is

just such a courtier. At Clarissa’s party, Peter Walsh thinks, “Lord, lord, the snobbery of

the English!... How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage! There!

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. That must be, by Jove it was, Hugh Whitbread, snuffing round the precincts of the great”

(262). Sally Seton sees through Hugh and tells him “he represented all that was most

detestable in British middle-class life” (110). She complains that “He’s read nothing,

thought nothing, felt nothing” and considers him “a perfect specimen of the public school

type.... No country but England could have produced him” (110). Hugh is always

viewed as being quintessentially English, and the other characters who see him as such

mean this as an insult. After noticing Hugh at Clarissa’s party, Peter thinks that “God

knows the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less

harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness” (263). With Hugh and

England so connected, Woolf indicates its precarious state. If “Mrs Dalloway is a

penetrating indictment of British imperialism, the ‘tolerable show’ which covers over a

hollow heart, the ‘damnable humbug’ that reduces to ‘stuffing and bunkum’ what is

owed to the young and the war-dead” (Tylee 152), then Woolf’s use of the wobbly

triangle of Aunt Helena, Lady Bruton, and Hugh establishes the political changes that are

occurring to the show of imperialism. Empire has reached the end of its line, and the

fa9ade it has left is easily ridiculed.

In one of the moments when Clarissa is thinking fondly of Peter Walsh, she

recalls how “She owed him words: ‘sentimental,’ ‘civilized’; they started up every day

of her life as if he guarded her. A book was sentimental; an attitude to life sentimental.

‘Sentimental,’ perhaps she was to be thinking of the past” (53-4). Peter, who at Bourton

was Clarissa’s tutor in the ways of the world, sets up a strict binary for Clarissa to

follow. Of course, Clarissa is to play the sentimental female to Peter’s civilized male,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and equally certain is that the sentimental side of the binary is the strong civilized us’s

weak them. Peter will later think that Clarissa has become “sentimental,” and he will

mean the term as an insult In that same paragraph, he. proceeds to think of the work he

has done bringing “civilization” to India: the wheel-barrows mentioned previously that

the coolies disdain (73). As Peter walks through the streets of London, he constantly

refers to civilization and things civilized. He considers that “the future of civilization

lies...in the hands of young men...such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of

abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in

the Himalayas” (75-6); civilization will thus be sent from England to where Peter is

doing civilization's work in the colonies. He muses, “A splendid achievement in its own

way, after all, London; the season; civilization” (82), and then, “there were moments

when civilization, even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession;

moments of pride in England” (82). Virginia Woolf, however, knows better, and sets out

to complicate Peter’s simplistic civilization/sentimental binary. For besides getting

English literature sent to him in the Himalayas, Clarissa also “comes” to Peter there as he

philosophizes about civilization on his high perch. Peter admits that Clarissa “had come

to him; on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things.... and always

in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, lady-like, critical; or

ravishing, romantic, recalling some field or English harvest” (232-3). Then, when Peter

returns from his life in the colonies-empire work which is often portrayed as a male

adventure—when he should be able to demarcate the border between civilization and

sentimental without even thinking about it, Woolf creates a confusion in Peter that he is

not aware of, but that the reader—sentimental book in tow—realizes. For Peter first sees

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Rezia trying to rein in Septimus’s shell-shock and thinks they are “lovers squabbling

under a tree; the domestic family life of the parks. Never had he seen London look so

enchanting.. .the civilization, after India, he thought...” (107). Still later, Peter will

begin to discourse about civilization and sentimental after being prompted by the sound

of an ambulance—“That was civilization. It struck him coming back from the East—the

efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit of London” (229)—which the reader

knows is carrying Septimus, a man ruined by “civilization.” Peter is all in a muddle and

does not know it His binary does not—and should not—stand.

As a character, Clarissa has been criticized for her insularity and seeming self-

centeredness. She believes that when the war ended all returned to normal, for instance,

and she is rather flippantly dismissive about the subject of Richard’s committee-work,

the plight of the Armenians (Tate 153). Woolf would be more sympathetic towards

Clarissa; for in her diary she herself wrote that “In the way of history the Germans have

gone back to Germany. People go on being shot & hanged in Ireland.... The worst of it

is the screen between our eyes & these gallows is so thick. So easily one forgets it—or I

do.... Is it a proof of civilization to envisage suffering at a distance...? ’ (2,100)

Clarissa, caught up in the bustle of a June day in the London of 1924, is prone to view

short-sightedly the world from her mostly comfortable side of the binary—or so one

might cursorily think. For Woolf gives Clarissa the underlying tendency to always turn a

two into three, which enables her to circumvent the restrictions of conventional marriage.

Clarissa thrives on the power-struggles inherent in a triangular relationship—indeed, she

seeks them out. Woolf’s most significant “constellation,” as Phillips has noted, is the

juxtaposition of “Empire making, war making, and gender relations” (vii); by having

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Clarissa complicate the gender issue with her triumvirates, she demonstrates a way for all

the simple binaries so prevalent in the times to be thus dismantled. In a diary entry about

composing the end of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf writes, “There I am now—at last at the

party, which is to begin in the kitchen, and climb slowly upstairs. It is to be a most

complicated spirited solid piece, knitting together everything & ending on three notes, at

different stages of the staircase, each saying something to sum up Clarissa” (2,312). By

making Clarissa herself always choose “three notes” over two, Woolf proposes the first

step towards “knitting together everything” that is in a bifurcated disarray.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER m

EMPIRE, REVISED IN PAT BARKER’S REGENERATION TRILOGY

In The Ghost Road the wartime prostitutes are all “great enthusiast[s] for Empire”

(G 36), but they stand alone. The soldiers fighting in the Great War are “the Sons of

Empire,” but they are small and sickly and their fatigues do not fit, since “some of the

Sons of Empire didn’t get much to eat when they were kids” (G175-6). The soldier who

appears in all three books of Pat Barker’s trilogy, Billy Prior, writes of how while

retreating from the front line after an interminable battle, “I waited for the sun to go

down. And the sodding thing didn’t. IT ROSE” (G197-8). While nearing the end of the

Great War, the British Empire, it seems, is losing its luster its sons want its symbolic

sun to set Pat Barker has much to say about Empire. By giving all three books of her

Regeneration Trilogy a Great War setting, she reconstructs an effective vantage point for

viewing the British Empire at the crucial moment of the beginning of its end. At one

point Ruth Head, a character in Regeneration, guiltily confesses that she rather enjoys

the air raids of the war, that she experiences “an immense sense of exhilaration” during

them, and that she has “this feeling that the ...crust of everything is starting to crack” (R

164). It is this—the cracking surface of Empire—which Barker documents in her novels,

using the war as a way to expose both the discrepancies and hypocrisies of empire, as

well as the more positive changes that accompany its nascent dissolution.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Great War is often reflected upon as signifying the end of a halcyon era and

the beginning of the disunities of the modem age. Much has been made of the perfect

summer season experienced in 1914, and how in hindsight it contributed to the before

and after demarcation of the war. In his book. The Great War and Modem Memory, Paul

Fussell claims that “Although some memories of the benign last summer before the war

can be discounted as standard romantic retrospection turned even rosier by egregious

contrast with what followed, all agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for

many years” (23), and that “For the modem imagination that last summer has assumed

the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost” (24).

Throughout the trilogy, Barker works to erase this line between the times by showing

how the tenets of war are an extension of the tenets of Empire—and both are crumbling.

Other critics and historians have not hesitated to make the connection between the

horrors of World War I and the beginnings of the end of the British Empire. Claire

Tylee, for example, takes this same notion of a pre-war/post-war divide and unites it to

the image of empire. She writes that the “myth” of pre-war innocence “has combined

with an idea of Britain’s lost imperial splendour to support the current imagery by which

the Great War was viewed over and over in diaries and memoirs: that the War was like

the Hood, the Deluge, the Fall from Grace, and the world which was lost was Paradise”

(245). In Propaganda and Empire, John M. Mackenzie avers that: “Some have seen the

Boer War as cracking the imperial spirit More conventionally, the Great War has been

regarded as the critical turning point. The war, it is alleged, was followed by a period of

pacifism, and militarism and imperialism were so intertwined in the late Victorian and

Edwardian periods that revulsion from the one led to rejection of the other” (Mackenzie

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9). Of course, the war itself was in part a war fought over the threat made to Britain’s

imperial status: “It was because the German challenge to Britain’s imperial position was

a general one rather than a specific set of territorial demands that it seemed so dangerous”

(Joll 181). And the war did destroy empires, as well as the sentiment felt toward empires.

As A. J. P. Taylor observes, “Before the war there had been four empires in Europe; after

it, there was none.... The King of England was the only remaining Emperor in the world,

in his capacity as Emperor of India; even that had only another generation to run” (284).

The British were right to feel that their empire was beleaguered. The First World War

was in reality both the beginning of the end of empire and the unignorable signal that its

dissolution was eminent. Regardless of how sunny and pastoral and halcyon the

summers to come might be, the war made the British troubled over their now obviously

troubled empire.

In her Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker thus reveals the beginnings of the

dissolution of the British Empire, both at home and abroad. The question that arises,

then, is why use war to discuss empire? Why does Barker bother to intersperse Rivers’s

thoughts of his time in Melanesia, for example, with Billy Prior’s experience as a soldier

at the front? Why mix fictional characters with historical figures? Answers to such

questions can be found in a motif that recurs in articles written about England in the past

few years. Journalism about England often will contain references to its postimperial

state, usually putting this in terms of loss and pessimism. For example, Tony Blair is

quoted inThe New Yorker as saying, “Britain is a great country that has been through the

pain of losing an empire, of having started this century as probably the superpower of the

world...” (119). And in a more recent Nation article the past tense is optimistically used

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to claim that “under this longed-for Labour government we have seen competent

management and an end to postimperial gloom” (23). As I document in greater detail in

Chapter 4, in the mid-nineties it was a frequent occurrence to hear England’s postimperial

state mentioned as a malady, an illness to be cured, or a trauma from which the English

were struggling to recover. We might understand this cultural phenomenon in the terms

laid out by Cathy Caruth, as she writes about Freud’sBeyond the Pleasure Principle: “In

trauma, that is, the outside has gone inside without any mediation” (59), and continues on

to explain how mediation is needed for there to be recovery, so often a person who has

experienced a trauma will have dreams of the traumatic event as a means of trying to

process that what happened was not recognized at the time that it occurred. As Caruth

writes, “The return of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct

experience but, rather, of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to

attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place” (62). In her trilogy,

Barker’s approach to war is as an event that can expose Empire and be used as a means of

“grasping” its demise; she returns to the Great War and specifically explores and

processes its connection to this demise. In the nineties, when Barker wrote the trilogy,

enough time had passed for it to be evident that the Great War in many ways signaled the

beginning of the end of the British Empire, as well as for it to be acknowledged how

significant such a demise was for the nation’s self-image. The end of the twentieth

century becomes an opportune time to return to the war and examine it as a crucial

moment for empire. And as Pat Barker travels to the beginning of Empire’s end, she

does not go unarmed.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The traits Barker emphasizes about her three main characters—Siegfried Sassoon,

Billy Prior, and W. H. R. Rivers—reveal much about her approach to empire. Barker’s

Sassoon is supposed to be a portrayal of the real man, and as such she does not deviate

much from the known facts about his life and wartime experiences. He is very much a

man of his times and is tormented by the futility of trench warfare. Barker emphasizes

Sassoon’s many paradoxes: that he wrote an anti-war declaration while at the same time

being a much medalled and respected soldier, that he chose to return to the Front and

would initiate daredevil raids—and then return to camp and write an anti-war poem. He

is a writer, yet he is writing from within the historical situation; he does not have the

benefit of hindsight. In contrast, Barker’s Billy Prior—a wholly fictional character—is in

many ways a postmodern character. Billy crosses all boundaries: he can pass for both

working and officer class, he is both gay and straight, healthy and sick, pro and anti-war,

more importantly, however, Billy is always incredibly aware of what is going on around

him and the underlying reasons for it; he has superb analytical skills. He is almost a

time-travelen Barker has set loose into the fray of the Great War a postmodern fellow

equipped with hindsight and the mindset of the second half of the twentieth century.

However, when the trilogy begins, Billy, like Sassoon, is suffering from shell

shock, and it falls to Rivers to psychoanalyze and cure both Sassoon and Billy. He is the

hearer of their testimony of the war; he processes and integrates the modem and

postmodern viewpoints. Rivers is very much a Freudian —and as such is slightly ahead

of his own times. He has studied Freud’s theories, and takes the Freudian approach to the

treatment of his patients. As Shoshana Felman writes in Testimony, Freud began the

“psychoanalytic dialogue...in which the doctor’s testimony does not substitute itself for

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the patient’s testimony, but resonates with it, because, as Freud discovers, it takes two to

witness the unconscious” (15). This is Rivers’s role in Barker’s trilogy: he, perhaps as a

stand-in for the reader, is able to go farther than Sassoon, a victim of his times, and Billy,

a victim of being out of his times. Rivers, as a hearer of testimony, is the one who is able

to acknowledge—and finally celebrate—empire’s demise.

It is also Rivers who constantly makes the connections between the experiences

and traumas of the soldiers at the front with his remembered experiences of his ethnology

work in colonized Melanesia. The war becomes less of a Euro-centered event as Rivers

is able to take the knowledge he acquired from his observations of the colonized

Melanesians struggling to adapt to the new British laws they are forced to abide by, and

use it to help in his treatment of English soldiers suffering from shell shock. The victims

of empire and the victims of war share symptoms, and Barker establishes such

similarities to erode the us/them dichotomy upon which empire rests. However, Barker’s

choice of using the real Dr. Rivers as her character who will serve as witness to the war

testimony of the soldiers is an essential one. For Rivers—as an ethnologist and

psychiatrist who thus has studied and observed the effects of colonization on other

cultures, and the effects on those who have to fight to enable such colonization to

continue—occupies the perfect vantage point for both dismantling the binaries of empire

and war, and processing the loss of an imperial identity. It is his expertise in both fields

that makes him the right medium for Barker’s purposes.

Rivers was said to be “among the first in England to support the discoveries of

Freud in the field of psychoneurosis and psychotherapy” (Showalter 181). He made the

theories of Freud—and psychoanalysis itself—palatable to the English public by

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “minimizing the significance of the sexual drives in Freudian theory” (Showalter 189).

His knowledge and ability as a psychoanalyst is a crucial element of his value to Barker.

In her book, Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock contends “ .. .that psychoanalysis and

material history are mutually necessary for a strategic engagement with unstable

power...” (73-4); and in The Order o f Things, Foucault claims that “Psychoanalysis and

ethnology occupy a privileged position in our knowledge.. .but rather because.. .they

form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and

above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and

contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established” (373). Well-versed

in both fields, who better than Rivers to call into question, criticize, and contest the tenets

of empire? Rivers himself saw an essential connection between the two disciplines. His

friend and fellow scientist, G. Elliot Smith, claimed that “Ethnology had no attractions

for Rivers until his work in Psychology was responsible for drawing him into this field of

investigation” (Smith x). And in the introduction to his two-volume study of Melanesian

society, Rivers writes that “If, however, the two studies [ethnology and psychiatry] are

thus to go on side by side, it is impossible that either can progress without making

assumptions based on knowledge which belongs properly to the domain of the other”

(The History o f Melanesian Society, 1,7). Barker will make use of this intersection and

overlap by having Rivers analyze and witness the soldiers’ war trauma, and recollect how

he analyzed and witnessed the newly restricted lives of the colonized Melanesians. It

will be Rivers’s awareness and realization of what is occurring in that particular moment

of the British Empire— juxtaposed with his recollections of occurrences in the colonies a

few years before the war—that Barker will employ in her trilogy.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. When Barker originally conceived of her idea for a trilogy, she “hoped to write

‘an entirely noncombatant account’ of the First World War” (Morrison 80). This does

not end up being the case, yet although the trilogy is focused upon the battlefront

experiences of two soldiers and the doctor who treats them, Barker is able to give at least

equal thematic weight to the changes that the war brings to the domestic front as well. As

Anne McClintock argues, “...imperialism is not something that happened elsewhere—a

disagreeable fact of history external to Western identity” (5); rather, British imperialism

is specifically constructed in England. Barker thus balances her portrayal of the

tribulations of empire’s frontlines—war and the colonies—with a portrayal of such

dissolution beginning to occur at “home” in England itself. InThe Eye in the Door,

especially, Barker explores the effects of the dissolution of Empire at home3: her wartime

England is a place where the vision of Empire’s panopticon is beginning to blur, and

there is less distinction between the watcher and the watched. “Imperialist capitalism

relied on rigid codes of expression and behavior at home as well as abroad” (Wachman

8), as did imperialism itself, and Barker shows how during the war, certain of these

“codes” were more strictly enforced. She emphasizes the gender discrepancy that the war

opens up: as the men’s hope and helplessness increase, so do the new wartime

opportunities for women.

Barker also portrays how class divisions continue to create tensions both in

England and at the front* as Billy Prior’s father remarks, “time enough to do summat for

the Empire when the Empire’s done summat for you” (R 56). And perhaps most

importantly, Barker repeatedly returns to the trials and paranoias surrounding issues of

homosexuality. Much is continually being made of the rumored German list of 47,000

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. English homosexuals, and both civilians and soldiers closely follow the trial—the so-

called Pemberton Billing affair—where the accusations of such a list are formalized.

Barker makes the trial a frequent topic of conversation in the trenches. Whereas

Regeneration begins with Sassoon’s declaration against the war—which becomes the

central theme of that novel —The Eye in the Door begins with Billy Prior first attempting

his luck with a young woman, but eventually going home for a tryst with a fellow officer.

Such affairs are repeatedly highlighted in the trilogy, and there is ambiguity surrounding

the sexual orientation of all of the main characters. Barker uses homosexuality to

illustrate how the empire is trying—and of course failing—to have control over all

aspects of its citizens’ lives.

Empire. Revised

Throughout theRegeneration Trilogy, Barker establishes the connections between

war and empire by breaking down the pre-war/post-war binary, and by showing how

smoothly the tenets of war extend from the tenets of empire. She thus is able to portray

empire crumbling abroad in the war, and empire dissembling at home as a result of the

war. But perhaps her most interesting and significant method for approaching the

phenomenon of empire at this particular moment of the beginning of its end resides in the

traits she gives to her three main characters. There are many ways in which these three

characters —Siegfried Sassoon, Billy Prior, and W. H. R. Rivers—are linked. In

Regeneration, for example, Sassoon and Prior are both patients of Rivers. Rivers

develops relationships with both men that intrigue him enough to keep in touch with them

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. after they have been discharged from Craiglockhart In The Eye in the Door and The

Ghost Road, Rivers will continue to act in the role of therapist, both helping and learning

much himself from Sassoon and Prior. The three men have other connections as well:

they have friends and inclinations in common, and all three seem to share an awareness of

the paradoxes and inanities of the war—to varying degrees, they know what is going on.

Barker also gives them symbolic associations: all are “doubled” in some way, and

aware of a split in their lives. On a simpler level, too, the three men are always reflected,

whether in the present or in past recollections. For example, Sassoon thinks of how “A

memory tweaked the edges of his mind. Another glass, on the top landing at home, a

dark, oval mirror framing the face of a small, pale child. Himself. Five years old,

perhaps. Now why did he remember that?” (R 145). Perhaps because Rivers and Prior

also recall significant moments in their childhoods where they sat on the top landing and

looked at their reflection—in Rivers’s case a portrait of his namesake relative which

scared him (and caused his stuttering), and in Prior’s a glass-fronted barometer which

Prior used to escape from the sounds of his parents’ fighting. Rivers also sees other

reflections of himself, in moments such as “Night had turned the window into a black

mirror. His face floated there, and behind it, Siegfried and the rumpled bed” (£ 233).

And in the beginning of The Eye in the door, Prior, in Manning’s house, looks about him

and sees that “Everything was under dust-sheets except the tall mirror that reflected,

through the open door, the mirror in the hall. Prior found himself staring down a long

corridor of Priors, some with their backs to him, none more obviously real than the rest”

(£ 10). These reflective reflection moments are not a matter of narcissism: rather they

act as a clue to how the reader can choose to see the trilogy. In addition to serving the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. plot, Barker reflects Sassoon, Prior, and Rivers in such a manner that enables the reader to

see them as mapping a way for the Great War to speak about the British Empire’s

beginning dissolution, as well as what that means to the contemporary reader. Sassoon

ultimately is a character of his times, a modernist who cannot transcend modernist

anxieties; Billy Prior is the postmodern character “sent back” to the Great War to do

things right; and Rivers acts as the hearer of testimony, the one who can model how to

analyze, synthesize, and come to terms with historical events.

Barker emphasizes Sassoon’s need to see and experience both sides. He is a

warrior and a pacifist, yet is not comfortable being either he seems to need to switch

back and forth and hover in-between, and is himself troubled by this need. In contrast,

both Prior and Rivers accept that a certain amount of duality is a necessity in the modem

world. Rivers admits that he is “a deeply divided man” yet thinks this division helps in

his professional life (E 141); Prior’s divisions seem to help him—they double his skills.

But Sassoon struggles against the duality that he is constantly acting out. Rivers sees him

as a man “striving for consistency, for singleness of being” despite the fact that his

“internal divisions had been dangerously deepened by the war” (E 229). In The Eye,

Barker has Sassoon claim, “I keep thinking how big it is, the war, and how impossible it

is to write about” (220). Yet of course, Sassoon is known for his writing about the war;

he is one of the most prominent of the Great War poets. Barker very much presents

Sassoon as a writer; it is important that in the midst of all the general turmoil of the war

and Sassoon’s particular turmoil of declaring himself against it and suffering from shell

shock and related hallucinations, Sassoon remains, prominently, a writer—and a working

writer at that (Fittingly, too, Rivers was known to have “encouraged the writing of

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. poetry as therapy” (Tylee 61).) It was at Craiglockhart that the real Sassoon met the real

Wilfred Owen and helped him with his poetry. Using the manuscripts that exist of

Owen’s poetry covered with Sassoon’s comments, Barker fictionalizes these working

sessions and devotes several chapters to creating these rather unusual writers’ workshop

scenes. Despite his claim of the “impossibility” of writing about the war, Barker portrays

a Sassoon who is determined to do just that.

In Testimony, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub write that witnessing the

Holocaust has been an “as yet unresolvedcrisis o f history, a crisis which in turn is

translated into a crisis o f literature insofar as literature becomes a witness, and perhaps

the only witness, to the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated,

witnessed in the given categories of history itself’ (xviii). Although the Holocaust of

course has its own unique horrors, the trauma experienced by soldiers in the trenches

make Felman’s theories applicable to aspects of the Great War as well. This is why

Sassoon—a writer in real life—is so useful for Barker. In her trilogy she writes overtly

about war while also addressing the issue of war as the beginning of the end for the

British Empire. In The Ghost Road she tackles this directly by interspersing Rivers’s

recollections of the empire abroad with war moments at the front In Regeneration she

prepares for this by having Sassoon the writer continually attempt to document the trauma

he witnesses and experiences. Sassoon is the one who translates the “crisis of history”

(unresolved at this point as to what it will mean for empire) into a “crisis of literature.”

Sassoon is the witness of the experience of trench warfare, but he is also a “witness” in a

larger sense of a heretofore unarticulable crisis.

I l l

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sassoon, as the character who is in many ways the representative of his times, is

also constrained by them. He does not seem able to gain the kind of larger-picture

awareness that Billy Prior and Rivers can glean. He approaches the war as the war and

wrestles with it on the terms with which it has been presented—which are often the

propagandists binaries which he is able to see through. For Sassoon, then, ‘Telling thus

entails a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and a re-extemalization of the evil that

affected and contaminated the trauma victim” (Laub 69); he writes to make things right

again. Felman explains that;

Both [psychoanalysis and literature], henceforth, will be considered as primarily events o f speech, and their testimony, in both cases, will be understood as a mode oftruth’s realization beyond what is available as statement, beyond what is available, that is, as a truth transparent to itself and entirely known, given, in advance, prior to the very process of its utterance. The testimony will thereby by understood, in other words, not as a mode of statement of, but rather as a mode ofaccess to, that truth. (15-6)

This intersects with what Barker is doing in Regeneration: she uses Sassoon’s writing

and Rivers’s psychoanalysis as a first step towards explicating the significance of the

Great War as Empire’s first major twentieth-century ailment, which led directly to its

precipitous decline. She devotes several chapters to showing Sassoon in action as a

writer, both to establish his writing as this “mode of access to” the truths of the war, and

as a symptom of its ailment

When Sassoon and Owen meet at Craiglockhart, Sassoon is already a poet of

some fame, whereas Owen is just beginning his brief career as poet Owen is familiar

with Sassoon’s work and is rather star-struck by him; he is flattered when Sassoon shows

interest in helping him revise his poems. In most of the workshop scenes that Barker

creates, Sassoon is helping Owen with his “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Sassoon, to a

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. certain extent, seems overly preoccupied that Owen gets it “right,” that the poem works

not only as art but as art that tells—and documents—the truth. He does not at all want to

see the war glorified, and criticizes with an “Owen, for God’s sake, this is War Office

propaganda” (R 141). By their next workshop session, Owen has revised much and

Sassoon admits that the poem is “transformed (R 157). Sassoon is still worried,

however, that there are too many inherent contradictions in Owen’s poem, and comments

that “I just don’t like the idea of.. .making it out to be less of a horror than it really is” (R

157). Before both men are discharged from the hospital, they meet for one last workshop.

This time they meet in the lounge, and Barker writes that “They had the room to

themselves, except for one other member, and he was half hidden behind the Scotsman”

(/? 217). As they read and revise their poetry out loud, then, they already have a listener,

someone who—perhaps—is taking note of their testimony. When their goodbyes have

been said, and Sassoon has left the lounge, Barker once again mentions this third man,

writing that “the unseen listener had gone” (R 219). She thus emphasizes the role that

writing is to play in Regeneration; it is “a mode of access to” (Felman 16) the crisis of

empire to which she is using war as an entry.

In contrast to Sassoon, Barker creates a completely fictional character, Billy Prior,

who in many ways is quintessentially postmodern. He is a product of hindsight; this is

not to say that Billy Prior is unbelievable, but that he is a man who would be quite at

home in the second half of the twentieth century as well. Barker gives Billy an almost

uncanny awareness of the tensions surrounding the war he understands the war’s

upheaval. One of the methods Barker uses to portray Billy’s many transformative talents

is to make him always two things at once. Whereas Sassoon is not comfortable being one

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. way or the other and hovers between in a manner that is annoyingly noncommittal, Billy

Prior can fit both sides of a binary almost perfectly. When he first appears in

Regeneration, he is suffering from mutism. He cannot or will not speak, yet when he

writes notes to Rivers on a pad, he prints all in capitals because it is “CLEARER” (R 42).

He refuses to communicate normally, while simultaneously making sure that what he

does communicate will be immediately understood. This paradox fittingly introduces

Prior’s character, for throughout the entire trilogy Prior crosses all lines skillfully.

Several times Rivers notes how Prior seems both large and small, weak and

strong. When Rivers hears Prior speak for the first time, he notes that “Hearing Prior’s

voice for the first time had the curious effect of making him look different. Thinner, more

defensive. And, at the same time, a lot tougher” (R 49). To Rivers, Prior almost always

seems to appear just as easily one way as he does the other; he reminds Rivers “of a

toddler clinging to his father’s sleeve in order to be able to deliver a harder kick on his

shins” (E 76). He is dependent and independent, needy and ferocious. When Prior’s

parents come to visit him at Craiglockhart and introduce themselves to Rivers, Prior’s

duality becomes more explicable. On the one hand his father tried to toughen Billy as a

child, forcing him to stand up for himself and fight the kids that teased him; his mother,

on the other hand, tried to keep him inside, encouraged him to study and rise out of the

class into which he was bom. Mr. Prior blames Billy’s double identity on his wife, telling

Rivers, “He’s neither fish nor fowl, and she’s too bloody daft to see it” (R 57). He tells

Rivers that Billy is aware of his double identity and “underneath doesn’tthank her for it”

(R 57). While perhaps not thankful for this ability, Billy does take full advantage of it

He frequently changes his accent and mannerisms to become the epitome of whatever

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. class the situation calls for. His viewers are always fooled. When Prior first meets Sarah

in a cafd, she thinks that he is of the officer class he is dressed to be. When he tells her

his name is Prior, “She burst out laughing. ‘Don’t you lothave Christian names?'

‘Billy.’ He wanted to say, and I’m not ‘you lot’” (R 89).

Civilians are led to believe that class issues do not matter at the front, that the

army is all one big happy family, and that the only divisions are between the British and

the Germans. Prior, ever observant, knows of course that this is not true. He sees the

divisions and is angered by them. He grumbles to Rivers, “The only thing that really

makes me angry is when people at home say there are no class distinctions at the front

Ball-ocks. What you wear, what you eat. Where you sleep. What you carry. The men

are pack animals” (R 67). It is perhaps in order to defy these distinctions then, that Prior

so easily acts one class and then the other. He changes class appearance any time and in

any situation. While liaisoning with Charles Manning, an officer who solicits Prior in

London, he realizes that Manning would be more at ease if Prior seemed more working

class. No problem—he simply takes off his shirt, spikes up his short hair, hangs a

cigarette from his lip and “roughens” his accent: “He’d transformed himself into the sort

of working-class boy Manning would think it was all right to fuck. A sort of seminal

spittoon. And it worked” (£11). Echoing Prior’s father, Manning later thinks, “All the

same, the basic truth was the man was neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.

Socially. Sexually too, of course, though this was a less comfortable reflection” (£ 20).

Although Prior can act the part of the upper class officer, his loyalties remain with

the lower class. He and Manning have many skirmishes regarding class and the

assumptions that are connected with it. Prior often loses his temper and apologizes, but

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. usually with qualifications that are not voiced. For example, after a particularly heated

argument over class issues, Prior says to Manning, MTm sorry too.... You’re right, of

course. Class prejudice isn’t any more admirable for being directed upwards.’ Just more

fucking justified” (£ 203). Prior is troubled by how his ability to seem to belong to both

classes is viewed by those he respects. He can ignore his father’s comments, but when

his friends say similar things, he cannot dismiss them as easily. Although effortless, his

switches from side to side are consciously performed. When his childhood friend, Mac,

tells him that he does not trust him because he is in the “‘Officers’ mess one night, back

streets of Salford the next Equally at home or...Equally not at home, in both,”’ Prior is

defensive, yet is prepared to argue his reasons clearly, pointing out to Mac that the

binaries Mac constructs of good vs. evil, proletariat vs. aristocrat, are not so cleanly and

admirably constructed. For Mac is a conscientious objector, and Prior instructs him:

“Well, let me tell you, Mac, the part of the proletariat I’ve been fighting with—the vast

majority—they’d string you up from the nearest fucking lamp-post and not think twice

about it” (£ 110). The binaries are a construct, and Prior will not hesitate to cross their

false borders.

Even the binary of sickness and health is one that Billy Prior will not “respect”

He is sent back to England from the front originally because of mutism caused by shell

shock. He goes to Craiglockhart to be cured by Rivers, and is more or less cured while

there. However, the asthma which he had tried to hide flares up, and when he has his

medical boards at the end of his Craiglockhart stay, he is given a London desk job

because of it Prior says, “‘I’m only asthmaticpart of the time’” (R65). He is only

anything “part of the time” and sick aind healthy is just one of the many binaries he

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fudges. Prior and Rivers act as each other’s double in many complex ways throughout

the trilogy. When they meet at the hospital, the first way that their roles cross is a result

of Prior not being content with being solely the patient: he wants to be the doctor as well.

In one of his first sessions with Rivers after he gets his voice back, Prior says:

‘I don’t see why it has to be like this anyway.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘All the questions fromyou, all the answers from me. Why can’t it be both ways?’ (R 50)

Prior studies Rivers just as much as Rivers studies Prior. He reads Rivers’s book,The

Todas, and often immediately asks Rivers whatever question Rivers has just asked Prior.

Prior tells Rivers that he does not “agree with the treatment” Rivers is using on him (R 5).

He suggests to Rivers that Rivers try hypnosis. Rivers is frequently frustrated with

Prior’s role-switching, and one time retorts, “’You know one day you’re going to have to

accept the fact that you’re in this hospital because you’re ill. Not me. Not the CO. Not

the kitchen porter. You'” (R 97). Prior cannot stand to be so classified and role restricted.

Barker intends Prior to be versatile so that he can cope with the anxieties and

tensions of the war and empire’s dissolution; it is almost as if she sends Prior back to do

everything right. As I have already mentioned in my introduction, one way of seeing

Prior’s sophistication is to compare him to another literary shell-shock victim: Virginia

Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith. Although suffering from the same war-induced disease

as Septimus, Billy reflects the fact that Barker wrote her novels seventy years after Woolf

wrote Mrs Dalloway\ shell shock is no longer a half-inexplicable condition. Whereas

Septimus’s trauma is only sketched, Billy’s is analyzed fully. Cathy Caruth describes

how “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s

past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was preciselynot

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). For Septimus, this

trauma is his experience in the war, in general, but more specifically his witnessing of the

death of his best friend, Evans. Woolf writes that “when Evans was killed, just before the

Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was

the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably.

The war had taught him. It was sublime” (130). We witness here how Septimus has not

been able to “assimilate” the traumas of the war. As a survivor, Septimus is continually

haunted by images of Evans, yet he does not consciously know how he has been affected

by Evans death.

In contrast, Billy Prior understands exactly what he is going through—although

such knowledge does not necessarily give him control over his mental state. Where

Septimus’s attraction to Evans is just hinted at—they are “two dogs playing on a hearth

rug” and ’They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel

with each other” (Woolf 130)—Billy Prior is fully aware of his bisexuality. Billy is also

aware of the game of sex and doesn’t hesitate to play it as needed. As mentioned

previously, in The Eye he goes from Myra to Manning and then switches his class

appearance to make Manning more at ease. His lovemaking to Sarah, his fiancde, is

tender, yet he is also quite capable of using sex as a humiliation—as he does with the

class snob Birtwhistle. As he explains to Rivers later when discussing this episode,

Birtwhistle “happens to represent everything in England that isn't worth fighting for.

Which made him a rather bracing companion” (G 101). Billy is attracted to his fellow

soldiers, and is honest to himself about that fact and about the tensions it causes. He

worries about the possible sadism involved in being attracted to those whom one can

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game, but here the disproportion of power is real and the nakedness involuntary” (G 175).

He later muses how “soldiers’ nakedness has a quality of pathos, not merely because the

body is so obviously vulnerable, but because they put on indignity and anonymity with

their clothes, and for most people, civilians, most of the time, the reverse is true” (G176).

Towards the end of the war, having moved into a French town that the Germans have just

been forced to abandon, Billy has a liaison with a French adolescent who first thinks that

Billy is German and speaks to him in that language. Billy writes, “I suppose it should

have disgusted me, but it didn’t. In fact it had the opposite effect” (G 247); he does not

shy away from examining truthfully his own inclinations and urges.

Halfway through The Ghost Road, Barker has Billy, like Sassoon, pick up a pen

and begin to write his testimony. Ever aware, one of Billy’s first entries is about how

many people in his tent are writing: “And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At

least two would-be poets in this hut alone” (G 115). He then analyzes it a bit in his

characteristically flippant manner “Why? You have to ask yourself. I think it’s a way of

claiming immunity. First-person narrators can’t die, so as long as we keep telling the

story of our own lives we’re safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha” (G 115). Billy’s entries,

although in the form of letters back from his time to ours, more often read like letters

from our time to his. Billy analyzes the war

I think what you’re saying is basically a conspiracy theory, and like all conspiracy theories it’s optimistic. What you’re saying is, OK the war isn’t being fought for the reasons we’re told, but itis being fought for a reason.... I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn’t any kind of rational justification left. It’s become a self- perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody’s in control. Nobody knows how to stop. (G 143-4)

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Only the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres....But now...I realize there’s another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we’re gone, they’ll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them’ll take your hand off. (G 257)

Billy realizes the power inherent in a binary. Later, he defends his own sympathy for the

“other”: “The man I bayoneted. What worries me is that he was middle aged. Odd

really—it’s supposed to be golden youth you mourn for. But he was so obviously

somebody who should have been at home.... And yes, you could see all this in his

face—with some people you can. Some people do look exactly what they are. Fuck i f ’

(G 218). Billy’s awareness does not just begin with his journal writing, for in

Regeneration and The Eye his comments are always wryly astute. He seems to be the

only patient of Rivers who knows of Rivers’s ethnological past and works. In The Eye he

wonders “whether there aren’t periods when people do become aware of what’s

happening, and they look back on their previous unconscious selves and it seems like

decades ago. Another life” (100). Billy is a World War I soldier with the benefit of post-

World War II expertise.

Barker rewrites the Great War and the beginnings of the dissolution of empire

with a postmodern character who can cope with the occurring historical crises. She

makes him aware of what is going on in a way that is soothing to the reader; for Billy, the

traumais known as it happens, so it is never a trauma quite. Barker sends Billy back in

time to analyze the event from all sides as it happens, thus thwarting the surprise of the

trauma of the war and negating the “compulsion to repeat” (Freud 21). But she leaves it

to Rivers to hear Billy’s testimony and synthesize it with all the other testimonies he has

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. heard throughout the war. Billy writes that ‘It’s interesting, well, at least it interests me,

that we’re still afraid in this irrational way when at the same time we’re surrounded by the

worst the twentieth century can do: shells, revolvers, rifles, guns, gas” (G 242), and he

will die before being able to see that there is worse yet to come. In a final attack, Prior is

wounded so that he can’t reach his gas mask and then is poisoned by the gas. He is lying

in a water-filled ditch, and as he dies he “gazed at his reflection in the water, which broke

and reformed and broke again as bullets hit the surface” (G 273). Always at home on

both sides of a binary, and seemingly of two times, Billy loses consciousness and then

dies only when he can no longer see his reflection in the water. As a modem and a

postmodern character, Billy cannot be one thing: when he loses sight of his double in his

reflection, he—as one—must die.

Although heroic, Billy is not a super-hero: he needs help recovering from and

synthesizing what he learns and observes. Once again, it is W. H. R. Rivers to the rescue.

In Testimony, Felman and Laub write of the importance of testimony to Holocaust

survivors. They use Freud and his theory of traumatic neurosis to show how such

survivors need to speak and to testify to their horrific experiences, and that it is only with

a witness to this testimony that the experience can be processed, externalized and put in

the past Billy Prior and Rivers’s other patients are also trauma survivors, and it is Rivers

who acts as their witness and hears the testimony of their experiences. This is an essential

role, for as Felman suggests, the truth is not necessarily available to those who

experienced it Prior needs Rivers, as witness, to synthesize what he has undergone, for

“the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a truth that nonetheless continues to

escape him, a troth that is, essentially, not available to its own speaker” (Felman 15).

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that “there has to be a moment of., .recognition. Acceptance” (E 249). Or as Laub

describes,

Bearing witness to a trauma is, in fact, a process that includes the listener. For the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of one who hears. Testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to somebody, to somebody they have been waiting for for a long time. (70-1)

Prior, like his name, has to have the experiences prior to Rivers becoming a witness to

them. But Rivers as the hearer of testimony is the one who can synthesize, analyze, and

cure. It is Rivers who must come to terms with the war and with what the war signals

about empire’s demise. Rivers also functions as Barker’s—and the reader’s—proxy; as

Rivers draws the parallels between war and empire in The Ghost Road, and thus

retroactively reveals the war to be, amongst other things, a harbinger of the dissolution of

empire, he prepares the reader for what is to come by negating the surprise.

In many ways, Barker’s choice of using Rivers as a character who will bear

witness to the testimony of others is a perfect one, for the real Rivers was very much a

Freudian at a time when most doctors did not accept Freud’s theories, if they were aware

of them at all. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers was an “-oiogy” renaissance man. Bora in 1864,

Rivers became ill with typhoid and missed his final year of public school, thus preventing

him from following in his family’s footsteps and attending Cambridge. Since he could

not go to Cambridge, he decided to study medicine instead, and at the age of 22 became

the youngest medical graduate of the University of London (Slobodin 9). He spent

several years as a ship’s surgeon, before getting a position at the National Hospital, where

he remained until 1892, when he went to Germany to study neurophysiology and

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. psychology. In 1893, he became a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and presided

over a successful psychiatry laboratory there. At Cambridge, he met the zoologist

biologist and anthropologist A. L. Haddon, who convinced Rivers to go on the

“Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits,” which he was organizing

(Slobodin 21). At first resistant to the idea, Rivers finally capitulated and joined the

expedition; it was on this trip that Rivers became “seduced” by the field of ethnology.

Right from the beginning, Rivers would intersperse psychiatry with ethnology.

He spent 1901-2 “among the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in southwestern India,” and his

“resulting ethnography, The Todas, has long been regarded as a classic” (Slobodin 28).

While studying the Todas, Rivers “carried out psychological tests at the same time”

(Slobodin 30). After 1902, he divided his time between the study of ethnology and the

study of psychology, while also performing the well-known neurophysiological

experiments with Henry Head that Barker refers to in Regeneration (and uses for her

choice of its title). In the years leading up to the war, Rivers “had gotten psychology

started as a distinct academic discipline” at Cambridge” (Slobodin 37), and also spent

considerable time in Melanesia, working on his two-volume study of Melanesian society.

This was an extraordinarily productive time in Rivers’s life, yet interestingly, “Many of

his friends felt that ‘it was not really until the war that Rivers ‘found himself; that

through his work in treating psychoneuroses he achieved an emotional fulfillment that

had been missing in his laboratory research at Cambridge, and even in his teaching and

anthropological field work” (Showalter 183). As Rivers himself wrote in his 1919 essay,

“Mind and Medicine,” “Perhaps the most striking feature of the war from the medical

point of view has been the enormous scale upon which its conditions have produced

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. functional nervous disorders, a scale far surpassing any previous war..(1 2 8 ). But it

seemed that for Rivers, all of his fields of study both expanded during the war and came

together. Rivers seemed particularly able to apply the insights he gained observing the

war’s wreckage to all facets of his work. His biographer, Richard Slobodin, observes that

“the bulk of Rivers’s writing in the postwar years was in the area where psychology,

psychiatry, sociology, and ethnology converge” (74). It is this convergence—and the

awareness that it implies—that makes Rivers an ideal character for Barker.

Foucault, as previously observed, writes that psychoanalysis and ethnology both

“form...a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and

contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established” (373). Barker uses

Rivers’s well-known abilities as a psychoanalyst and an ethnologist, then, to elucidate the

dissatisfaction of empire’s dissolution and the ensuing loss of identity. According to

Foucault, ethnology and psychoanalysis “are directed towards that which, outside man,

makes it possible to know, with a positive knowledge, that which is given to or eludes his

consciousness” (378). This is precisely what Barker has Rivers do in the novels, by both

hearing the testimony of the shell-shocked soldiers, and then drawing parallels between

their experience and the colonized Melanesians. Rivers’s friend, Elliot Smith, writes that

Rivers was eager to be a war-time psychiatrist because “he found that the measures taken

to discover the causes of the soldier’s mental disabilities were so similar to those he had

been using in Melanesia to probe into the social and magico-religious problems of

peoples of lowly culture.... For he now began to integrate the processes of psychology

and ethnology into one discipline” (Smith xvii-xviii). What Rivers learns from the war

enables him to decrease the distance inherent in the vantage-point of empire and war’s

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discipline” is evident in his post-war writings, such as this essay in Psychology and

Politics, in which he suggests,

In the first place, we believe that if we succeed in discovering the historical processes by which human activity has produced the existing cultures of the earth, we shall then be provided with a mass of material by the study of which we can formulate the laws which direct and govern the activities and fate of those groups, whether we call them tribes, nations, or empires, into which the peoples of the earth are divided, as well as the laws which determine the growth of the social customs and institutions of mankind, (my italics) {Psychology and Politics 132-3)

Barker’s choice of W. H. R. Rivers is strategic. As ethnologist, anthropologist,

sociologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, neurophysiologist, and Freudian, the fictional

Rivers will have the time to synthesize what the real-life Rivers—who died suddenly in

1922 at the age of fifty-eight—did not

That Rivers championed Freudian analysis—albeit critically—also makes him suit

Barker’s project Felman writes that “In contrast it is by stepping in his turn into the

position of the patient, and by acknowledging an interchangeability between doctor and

patient... that Freud creates the revolutionized clinical dimension of thepsychoanalytic

dialogue, an unprecedented kind of dialogue in which the doctor’s testimony does not

substitute itself for the patient’s testimony, butresonates with it, because, as Freud

discovers, it takes two to witness the unconscious” (15). When Regeneration begins, we

see Rivers reading over and discussing Sassoon’s medical file, preparing for such a

psychoanalytic dialogue. Throughout the rest of the trilogy, Rivers is shown talking with

his patients, asking and answering questions, his insight indeed “resonating” with their

testimony. And Barker makes sure to show that he is aware of his role in the dialogue,

that there is a method behind what many of his colleagues see as a coddling kind of

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patient, who, as a doctor himself, “had some knowledge of Freud, though derived mainly

from secondary or prejudiced sources, and disliked, or perhaps feared, what he thought he

knew” (R 31). We see Rivers frequently analyzing his own dreams, revealing that he is

not afraid to practice what he preaches. In Eye, Rivers thinks: “he was in the state of

fatigue and illness that favours the development of an anxiety neurosis, and behaving in

the way most likely to bring it about. He was doing exactly what he told his patients not

to do: repressing the awareness of fear” (E 66). This is precisely how Rivers is “at the

same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness to himself. It is only in this way,

through his simultaneous awareness of the continuous flow of those inner hazards both in

the trauma witness and in himself, that he can become the enabler of the testimony—the

one who triggers its initiation, as well as the guardian of its process and of its momentum”

(Laub 58). Rivers uses his own methods on himself. We also see Rivers using the

Freudian terminology that Felman and Laub use Testimony:in he talks of traumatic

neurosis, and he works on a paper entitled “The Repression of War Experience,” which

he will present to the British Medical Association (R 173). Rivers is pruned to be a

hearer of testimony.

It is certainly true for Rivers that, as Felman and Laub write, ‘The professionally

trained receivers of the testimonies which bear witness to the war atrocities...cannot

fulfill their task without, in turn, passing through the crisis of experiencing their

boundaries, their separateness, their functionality, and indeed their sanity, at risk” (xvii).

As Rivers works as therapist and hears the testimony of his shell-shocked patients, trying

to cure their various neuroses, he frequently finds his own mental and physical health

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about these experiences, but also serving as witness to them. Rivers becomes, for

example, “as changed by Sassoon as Sassoon was by Rivers” (Showalter 187).

Furthermore, after finally getting his patient, Bums, to speak of his particular trauma

which involved a very decomposed body, Rivers admits that “his own sense of the horror

of the event seemed actually to have increased” (R 184). Experiencing insomnia one

night, Rivers feels himself “getting all the familiar symptoms” (R 139). When he goes to

see his doctor friend, Biyce, the next morning, Bryce asks him “‘What do you think’s

wrong?” and Rivers replies, “’War neurosis...I already stammer and I’m starting to

twitch’” (R 140). When Rivers visits his brother and sister-in-law for a short vacation

away from Craiglockhart, his sister-in-law, appalled by his poor health, treats him like the

common Victorian female hysteric and makes him do nothing but eat: “Rivers still

staggered away from the table feeling that he’d been force-fed” (R 150). Rivers’s own

maladies ease the divide between doctor and patient, making him a more sympathetic

witness.

Rivers’s own experience, which comes closest to those that trigger traumatic

neurosis in his patients, occurs when he visits Dr. Yealland—also a historical figure—and

a London psychiatrist who treats his patients in a manner that is the direct opposite to

Rivers’s own methods. Dr. Yealland is very similar to the Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw

in Woolf s Mrs Dalloway. Yealland’s patients—like Septimus Warren Smith—do not

stand a chance at regaining true mental health. Right from the moment Rivers enters the

hospital, he becomes anxious and sees the place as being akin to his patients’ wartime

surroundings: “This deserted corridor in a hospital he knew to be overcrowded had

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. something eerie about it Uncanny. Almost the feeling his patients described, talking

about their experience of the front of No Man’s Land, that landscape apparently devoid

of life that actually contained millions of men” (R 223). Rivers meets up with Yealland

and begins to follow him as he performs his morning rounds. Whereas Rivers is always

portrayed as a listener, in contrast, Yealland is described as a watcher (and perhaps thus

aligned with those who are unduly monitoring their fellow citizens): “In conversation he

did not merely meet your eye, but stared so intently that you felt your skull had become

transparent” (R 224). As Rivers will soon realize, however, Yealland’s vision is dark: he

sees electroshock treatment and bullying as being the only sure way to cure his patients.

On this particular day, they finally reach the last patient in the ward, a soldier named

Call an who is suffering from mutism. Yealland tells Rivers that part of his past treatment

of Callan has been “lighted cigarettes to the tongue” (R 227); Rivers is understandably

shocked. Today, however, Yealland is going to use electroshock therapy on Callan. With

Rivers observing, Yealland brings Callan into a room, pulls down the blinds and locks the

door. The room was dark except for one small light, which was focused on Callan; the

scene, as Rivers realizes, is akin to a torture chamber. Yealland tells Callan that

“‘Rememberyou must talk before you leave’” me and begins administering a series of

severe shocks (R 230). The “treatment” takes hours, and Rivers, identifying with the

patient, is exhausted by the end. As Yealland slowly makes Callan speak, “Rivers had to

stop himself trying to make the sound for him. He was himself very tense; all the worst

memories of his stammer came crowding into his mind” (R 231). At the pinnacle of the

treatment, Yealland proclaims, utYou must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you

have to say'” (R 231). If there was any doubt before, this moment completely establishes

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point on Rivers will more than ever strive to hear and to witness the testimony of his own

patients; he knows and accepts that “it takes two to witness the unconscious” (Felman 15).

Regeneration, the first book of the trilogy, gets its name from an experiment that

Rivers performed with a fellow scientist and friend, Henry Head. As Barker writes,

“Head had volunteered himself as the subject of the proposed experiment, and Rivers had

assisted at the operation in which Head’s radial nerve had been severed and sutured.

Then, together, over a period of five years, they had carted the progress of regeneration”

(R 46). Rivers acts as a witness to this regeneration, just as he is witness to the

regeneration of his patients suffering from the war. He will hear a patient’s testimony

and gradually convince him “to abandon his hopeless attempt to forget, and advising him

instead to spend some part of every day remembering” (/? 26). Barker intends for Rivers

to instruct the reader to do the same. Felman queries, “Is the testimony, therefore, a

simple medium of historical transmission, or is it, in obscure ways, the unsuspected

medium of a healing? If history has clinical dimensions, how can testimony intervene,

pragmatically and efficaciously, at once historically (politically) and clinically?” (9). By

witnessing the testimony of the war, like Rivers does, and by connecting the problems of

the war to the problems of empire—also as Rivers does, the reader can understand the

war as the beginning of empire’s end. In The Ghost Road, Barker writes that “Rivers

wondered whether Sassoon and Harrington had been too much in the forefront of his

mind while he was listening to Wansbeck. At best, on such occasions, one became a

conduit whereby one man’s hard-won experience of self-healing was made available to

another” (G 229). This indeed seems to be Rivers’s central task in the trilogy: to act as a

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “conduit” for the testimonies of the war, and then to process these testimonies in terms of

empire.

Fnwirr. AlrrMMl

In The Ghost Road, Rivers thinks to himself, “Before the war., .but one must

beware of attributing everything to the war. The change had started years before the war”

(225). This is a point that Barker frequently has her characters voice. In contrast to the

notion that the war was an about-face turning point, Barker instead emphasizes that the

tenets of war are the same as the tenets of empire; war exposes these tenets, but they have

been in play all along. Barker’s method is to first call attention to the binaries of war

-the us/them good/bad mentality that becomes such a central part of wartime language

and propaganda—and then to systematically mock and transgress it. The binaries

become one of her main targets, and this notion of the war being a sudden, unexpected

eruption is Barker’s starting point

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road are all set in the last two

years of World War I, a time when it was even more imperative than ever to adhere to the

dichotomies of the war. War demanded this kind of mind-set to question was to falter,

and to falter was to harm the empire—the “good” and “us” which was exactly what the

British army was both trying to safeguard and perpetuate. As Barker writes, ‘The

casualty lists were too terrible to admit of any public debate on the continuation of the

war” (R 211). Debate was not encouraged: the supposed uniqueness of the Great War

called for simple adherence to the decisions of the nation state. Especially in its last

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. years when the horrible facts of trench warfare were coming to light, the Great War was

presented as an anomaly and thus separate from anything that had come before; to make

it through such devastation demanded allegiance. Although she will ultimately

deconstruct this notion of the war as “an event which could be said to mark the beginning

of the modem world” (Fussell 11), Barker begins by establishing how prominent it was in

the discourse of the times. People insisted upon seeing the war as the beginning of

something new. The Great War was a time when “the mode of gross dichotomy came to

dominate perception and expression” (Fussell 79). Besides demanding and feeding on

binaries, it was an interval which emphasized this separation between times. For years

afterwards, time was divided into pre-war or post-war categories. The Great War

“reversed the Idea of Progress”; it pared down abstractions into basic right and wrongs

(Fussell 8). No matter what complex order of things the soldiers may have thought they

knew, in battle it was made clear to them that in the “reality” of war, everything was

simply this or that. As Fussell writes, ‘The innocent army fully attained the knowledge

of good and evil at the Somme on July 1,1916” (29). They learned that “one thing [was]

opposed to another, not with some Hegelian hope of synthesis involving a dissolution of

both extremes...but with a sense that one of the poles embodies so wicked a deficiency or

flaw of perversion that its total submission is called for” (Fussell 79). The Germans were

evil—they were “them”; everything about them was “other”. British soldiers in their

trenches even had a binary view: they could either see the earth walls of the trench, or

blue sky (Fussell 51). As one soldier said, “On this side of our wire everything is

familiar and every man is a friend, over there, beyond the wire, is the unknown, the

uncanny” (Gilbert & Gubar 267). Barker emphasizes this binary mentality inThe Eye in

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Door, when she prints a copy of “Haig’s April 13th Order of the Day”: ‘There is no

other course open to us but to fight it out Every position must be held to the last man:

there must be no retirement” (£ 6). In Haig's view there was no middle ground, no room

for negotiation—only losing or winning, no matter what the consequences. Part of Pat

Barker’s project is to show the dangers of such simplicities.

In his section on the binaries of war, Fussell points out that “One of the legacies

of the war is just this habit of simple distinction, simplification, and opposition. If truth

is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another”(79). It is exactly this lack of

ambiguity which often leaves Barker’s characters exposed in a no-man’s-land with

nowhere to take cover. As Barker develops how the binaries of war extend naturally

from, and are interchangeable with, the binaries of empire, she makes it clear just how

difficult it is for her characters to reconcile themselves with such a lack of ambiguity. In

an either/or world, one is forced to contort Barker reveals the impossibilities of

acquiescing to these binaries by having so many of her characters live a variety of

“double lives.” In doing so she shows that a thinking person cannot fit into the small

space that war propaganda allows; although her characters will often try to toe the line, so

to speak, they simply cannot comfortably remain in the one allotted binary side; they

begin to experiment with both sides: they double or split. Such double lives range from

the mundane to the extreme. For example, Rivers experiences a split between his

emotions and his intellect, and realizes how he has been so split for most of his life:

“Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man, and though he

would once have said that this division exercised little, if any influence on his thinking,

he had come to believe it had determined the direction of his research” (£ 141). Rivers

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. has made it his career to bridge the two sides: in the trilogy he will attempt to do this

with all binaries.

The character Charles Manning lives a double life with regards to his sexuality.

Manning is an officer who, after being wounded at the front, now works in the home

office in London. His family has gone to live in the countiy, so he has the space to

devote time to both sides of his desires. When in the countiy, he is a traditional family

man, husband, and father; when in London, he frequently has trysts with other men. In

fact, Eye begins with Billy Prior picking up Manning in the park and returning to

Manning’s London house for a rendezvous. As is usually the case Eye,in however,

someone is watching Manning go from side to side, and Barker writes that “For

somebody like Manning, profoundly committed to living a double life, the revelation that

both sides of his life were visible to unknown eyes must be like having the door to the

innermost part of one’s identity smashed open” (E 155). The binaries of sexuality

become even more enforced during the war, as I will discuss in greater detail in the

second section, and thus Manning feels it is even more imperative that his double life not

be exposed: following the mindset of the war, he is supposed to give up any ambiguity

and only inhabit one side of any given binary.

Siegfried Sassoon is another character who has to split himself and inhabit both

sides of the binary in order to survive. The very first words of Regeneration are

Sassoon’s declaration against war which lead to his being sent to Craiglockhart hospital.

In his typical desire to be on both sides, he titles it “A Soldier’s Declaration,” thus

claiming both viewpoints—-soldier and pacifist—as his own. Sassoon, as we come to see,

is both against the war, and wants to return to fight in it; it is Rivers’ s job at

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Craiglockhart to try to reconcile these two positions. Everyone seems aware of this

duality in Sassoon, including Sassoon himself. He tells Rivers in analysis that he was

fragmented even before the war, and that he was three people:

‘I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the.. .the other side.. .that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that And I didn’t seem able to....’ He laced his fingers. ‘Knot them together.” (R 35)

Here he defines only two of his “selves”; the third one is the self hovering between the

two. Sassoon is used to his own kind of separate versatility; he cannot be one thing only

for the sake of the war. He thrives on visiting all sides of a binary, and will not commit to

just one.

Sassoon is homosexual, but in the trilogy he will never come out and come out

He and Rivers are constantly having conversations where both men circle around

Sassoon’s sexuality, alluding to it indirectly, and then moving on quickly to another topic.

This is important in part because it illustrates Rivers’s own sexual ambiguity and

attraction to Sassoon; however, it also reveals Barker’s emphasis on the hesitating quality

of Sassoon’s personality. With the Wilde affair not too long in the past, in one sense it is

wise of Sassoon not to reveal openly that he is gay; but the hedging happens so often that

it seems to imply something more. Sassoon peppers his conversations with Rivers with

such statements as: “‘My intimate details disqualify me from military service”’ (/? 70).

In a longer conversation he tells Rivers that he really identifies with Edward Carpenter’s

idea of an “intermediate sex” (R 54). He is attracted to notions of in-between.

This fragmentation becomes even more extreme once the war begins, and once

there is even more pressure to be on one side only. Sassoon continually hops from one

side of the binary to the other. He becomes renowned for being a “Happy warrior one

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. minute. Bitter pacifist the next” (R 74). Sassoon eventually returns back to active

service, comforting himself with the paradox that “I’m not going back to kill people. I’m

only going back to look after some men’” (E 229). At the front where binaries are the

only law of the land, Sassoon finds it hard to keep up his intermediate stance. In a

manner that Billy Prior will later take to an extreme, Sassoon develops a kind of warrior

double, a self so separate that everyone notices and comments upon it Yet after

becoming one side for a time, he immediately writes a poem which incorporates both

sides; he returns to the middle ground. InThe Eye in the Door, Charles Manning says

regarding Sassoon: “You know he’s a tremendously successful andbloodthirsty platoon

commander, and yet at the same time, back in billets, out comes the notebook. Another

anti-war poem” (158). Later on in the novel, Rivers thinks that “Siegfried had always

coped with the war by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty,

efficient company commander” (233). Sassoon’s final war wound is a result of trying to

surmount the basic binary of wan not content with believing simply that the other side is

evil and should be considered simply that, Sassoon walks into a trench occupied by the

Germans. He does this not to kill, but to see. He tells Rivers, ‘7just wanted to see. I

wanted to see the other side” {E 231). Fussell points out that for the real Sassoon,

“workmanship means...the application of binary vision eveiywhere, even in the smallest

details” (104). Barker has Charles Manning tell Rivers that a poem of Sassoon’s “uses

the experience of the platoon commander, but it never uses any of his attitudes. And yet

for once, in that one poem, he gets both versions of himself in’” (£ 158). Barker’s

Sassoon explains the Sassoon of the poems; he can’t shake the binaries of war and is not

content being wholly one way or wholly the other. By making Sassoon’s place be in-

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between, Barker is able to subvert the accuracy of the wartime binaries. It is, of course,

not as easy as us/them good/bad pre-war/post-war, for the war is not an aberration but a

culmination of the policies and mindsets of empire, which have themselves thrived on

such binaries and what they mask. Sassoon’s splitting and hovering expose the false

borders of binary thinking; Billy Prior’s doubling will take such subversiveness a step

further.

Billy Prior is another of Barker’s characters who experiences a doubling of self.

In contrast to Sassoon, who can’t seem to inhabit either side of a binary fully, Billy Prior

has the ability to inhabit all sides comfortably. However, he often uses hate to get himself

to be fully one thing or fully the other; by making hate what fuels Billy, Barker calls into

question the motives behind binary thinking. When Prior has sex with the prostitute

Nelly in The Ghost Road, he remembers what it was like when he was young and was

paid for sex by Father Mackenzie. This memory comes at an inopportune moment, and

Prior thinks, ‘The only way not to be her was to hate her. Narrowing his eyes, he blurred

her features, ran them together into the face they pinned to the revolver targets. A

snarling, baby-eating boche” (G 41). In a moment when a separated binary is a necessity,

where he has to not be able to feel compassion for her side of the affair in order to

complete the act, Prior uses hate to become one thing, to know his side only—that of the

payer—and not hers, the payee. Significantly, he uses hate to become singular. As The

Eye in the Door progresses, we learn that this is also how Prior survived the horrors at the

front In a kind of mockery to the binaries that war demanded—that he had to only know

and empathize with “us” and not “them,” with good and not evil, Prior—who does not

follow those divisions, whose entire life has consisted of crossing all sides and playing all

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. roles—becomes a caricature of a prize warrior. This Prior is fully one way: singularly

rotten. He is a “warrior double, a creature formed out of Flanders clay” (£ 245). This

double tells Rivers, “‘I was bom two years ago. In a shell-hole in France. I have no

father’” (E 240). He is a better fighter than Prior, because he feels no pain or remorse; he

is demanding—he leaves Prior a message saying, “Why don’t you leave my Jucking cigars

alone?” (E 191); he makes deals with Spragge, a former Ministry of Munitions spy who

is responsible for putting the innocent Beattie Roper in jail; and he betrays Mac, his best

friend from childhood. This double follows the wartime ideal to the letter, yet he is

frightening, not admirable. The odiousness of Prior’s double mocks the ideal of adhering

to one side of a binary.

Since the us/them binary is central to both war and empire, it is crucial to Barker’s

project However, as she demonstrates, the problem with the us/them construct is that it

tends to multiply from within, resulting in a bevy of us/thems within the original “us”.

The “us” splinters and antagonisms abound. In her trilogy, Barker spotlights two major

divisions in particular the division between civilians and soldiers, and the class division

that exists between soldiers themselves. The division between civilians and soldiers was

understandable, since the civilians often just did not know about the horrors that the

soldiers were experiencing. There was no place for the realities of trench warfare in the

glories of war that the propaganda was still espousing: civilians were being fed their dose

of binaries as well. Thus, to a woman civilianhanding out white feathers, if a man was of

age and not in uniform, he was a coward, point blank. There was no place for in-

betweens, such as Barker’s character, Bums, discovers, while recuperating from shell

shock and haplessly wearing civilian clothes while in London. The gap between the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. perceptions of soldiers and civilians ultimately become a “divide which yawned between,

on the one side, the civilian.. .aware of and almost inured to, colossal slaughter, but

oblivious to the real tortures, physical and mental, of trench warfare, and on the other the

soldier who was enduring them” (Marwick 28). Barker’s Sassoon reveals his resentment

towards civilians by describing the two middle-aged men who are sharing his train

compartment as “both looking as if they’d done rather well out of the war” (R 5). Billy

Prior “was made physically sick by the sight and sound and smell of civilians” (E 7) and

begrudges their misuse of military vocabulary: “Like going over the top, he thought No,

it wasn’t Nothing was like that Civilians seemed to use that expression all the time

now. I went a bit over the top last night they said, meaning they’d had a second glass of

port” ( G 13). With such resentments, it is hard to feel unified.

Billy Prior, always the one to be on both sides of a binary, has a mixed class

background: his father is working class, whereas his mother is slipped middle class with

upper class pretensions. He was thus raised with an awareness of the customs of both,

and can switch back and forth, first passing as one and then the other, “equally not at

home in either” (£ 116). This is augmented by the fact that he becomes an officer, while

his roots are from northern England. It is thus Billy, attuned to class differences, who

often makes observations about these differences and tensions. InEye, Barker writes

about Billy:

One of the ways in which he felt different from his brother officers, one of the many, was that their England was a pastoral place: fields, streams, wooded valleys, medieval churches surrounded by ancient elms. They couldn’t grasp that for him, and for the vast majority of the men, the Front, with its mechanization, its reduction of the individual to a cog in a machine, its blasted landscape, was not a contrast with the life they’d known at home, in Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or the Welsh pit villages, but a nightmarish culmination. (E 115-6)

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. These different viewpoints matter a great deal at the Front Billy tells Rivers that “It’s

made perfectly clear when you arrive that some people are more welcome than others. It

helps if you’ve been to the right school. It helps if you hunt it helps if your shirts are the

right colour” (R 66). Later in The Ghost Road, Billy complains about a particularly

snobbish officer who remarked about the lower classes that “Of course one can’t rely on

them. Their values are totally different from ours. They’re a different species, really.

The WCs” (G 100). Such sentiments coming from that particular officer are easy to

dismiss, but Sassoon, who is portrayed sympathetically, makes similar observations in

Regeneration about the platoon he leads: “He recalled his horror at their physique....

None of the three had been more than five feet tall. You put them alongside an

officer—almost any officer—and they seemed to be almost a different order of being” (R

143). And the sentiment goes both ways. Billy Prior’s working class father thinks Billy

was crazy not to use his asthma as a way out of the war: ‘The weedy little runt would at

least have been behaving like a sensible weedy little runt, refusing to fight in ‘the bosses’

war’” (G 6). Such class antagonism is one of the many ways that Barker dismantles one

of the war’s main binaries; all the conflicting “us’s” complicate the intended simplicity of

the wartime us/them binary.

Barker has still another method for ridiculing the wartime binary, and that is to

foreground an equal—if not greater—number of the paradoxes produced by the war.

Such paradoxes, she thus implies, are the war’s true legacy. Rivers often feels

constricted by the need for everything to remain streamlined and simple during the war.

He “found himself plagued by questions that in Cambridge, in peacetime, he might have

wanted to pursue, but which in wartime, in an overcrowded hospital, were no use to him

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. at all” (R 19). He knows that in wartime he has to stick to his own particular assigned

binary of sick/healthy; he has to make soldiers fit to return to the front—which is a

twisted reason for fitness at best As Billy Prior will later point out in The Ghost Road, as

he looks around at his fellow rehabilitated soldiers: “We are Craiglockhart’s success

stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think—at least not

beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard

(but what doesthat mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely

steady. And we are still alive” (G 200). Rivers has done his job so that the soldiers can

return to do theirs: but all are aware of the ironies of the situation. Rivers, however,

remains quite conflicted about his job. He wants to make sure that the contradictions of

his position are known by the soldiers he is treating as well—he wants the paradox to be

above-board. After meeting with Sassoon for the first time in Regeneration, Rivers tells

him that he does not think Sassoon is particularly sick, and that he does not even seem to

have a “war neurosis,” the ailment most of Craiglockhart’s patients are suffering from.

Barker writes:

Sassoon digested this. ‘What have I got, then?’ ‘You seem to have a very powerfulanti -war neurosis.’ They looked at each other and laughed. Rivers said, ‘You realize, don’t you, that it’s my duty to...to try to change that? I can’t pretend to be neutral.(R 15)

Sassoon will often be the impetus that causes Rivers’s thinking to switch from the

comfortable binary to the more prickly paradox. Intellectually, Rivers agrees with

Sassoon’s declaration against the war; but this agreement makes his task of “curing”

Sassoon, so that he can go back to the front to be killed, even more difficult Rivers

knows that “as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. war experience rather than of his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became

the issue”(R 115), yet as an army doctor Rivers cannot let the war be "the issue”: he has

to ignore this quandary and just keep in mind the binary of healthy/sick. Rivers has to

keep such dilemmas to himself, and in the meantime say to his patients: "Go on...cry.

It’s all right to grieve. Breakdown’s nothing to be ashamed of—the pressures were

intolerable. But, also, stop crying. Get up on your feet. Walk” (G 96). Elaine Showalter

claims that the real Sassoon’s therapy with Rivers was “a seduction and a negotiation; his

return to France, an acknowledgment of defeat” (187). She sees Sassoon’s anti-war

stance—which Rivers has to convince Sassoon to renounce—as being the sane and

intelligent response to the experience of trench warfare. Barker thus uses Sassoon to

reveal aspects of Rivers’s complicity with empire and those in control of it. Rivers can

see the paradoxes in his work, yet in the time-span of the trilogy, he remains officially

aligned with empire’s stances.

There are other paradoxes connected to the war besides those surrounding illness

and breakdown. Barker writes that “One of the paradoxes of the war—one of the

many—was that the most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers

and men that was.. .domestic. Caring” (/? 107). The trench aspect of the war was also

paradoxical; the men were said to be mobilized, yet “they’d been mobilized into holes in

the ground so constricted they could hardly move” (R 107). Barker uses the complexities

of these paradoxes to highlight the false simplicities of the war binaries. Wartime

propaganda insisted that people see all conflicts in terms of black and white with no

questions asked, when in reality the war created situations which required even more

penetrable deciphering than usual. Billy Prior, aware as ever, points out another such

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. paradox when he ponders over how much he should tell his fiancde about the real

conditions at the Front. He thinks, “Men said they didn’t tell their women about France

because they didn’t want to worry them. But it was more than that. He needed her

ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and be known as deeply

as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable” (/? 216). While both Billy and

Rivers are struggling to untangle the paradoxes that have come their way, Barker shows

how some eagerly use the paradoxes to augment the powers that have been given them.

As we have seen, Dr. Yealland is a psychiatrist who is Rivers’s London counterpart.

While Rivers treats his shell-shock patients with analysis of the new, Freudian, variety,

Yealland’s methods are the extreme opposite. He uses a kind of electroshock therapy

treatment that Barker portrays as being torture, pure and simple. In contrast, then, to the

methods that Rivers uses to get mute soldiers to talk, Yealland is shown locking a mute

patient in a room and shocking him for hours until he is forced to speak. As the shocks

continue, Yealland triumphantly proclaims his newly created paradox: “You must speak,

but I shall not listen to anything you have to 231).say."(R To Yealland the situation is

simple: the soldier he is treating is pretending to be mute so that he, a coward, will not

have to return to the front; the coward, then, must be made to cross over to the other side

of the binary and be brave. War begets paradoxes while flying the banner of the binary.

Many of the binaries of war—such as the us/them binary—are also the binaries of

empire, so when Barker has characters question or deviate from the war binary, they

often will apply their disgruntlement to issues of empire as well. Several characters

express an awareness of the inequities of empire: as we have seen, Billy’s father remarks

that there is “time enough to do summat for the Empire when the Empire’s done summat

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for you” (R 56). And when people speak to Billy’s old friend, Hettie Roper, of saving

“gallant little Belgium,” she reminds them what “gallant little Belgium got up to in the

Congo” (£ 85). When her listeners protest, she facetiously says that “I was only doing it

to compare a bad colonial regime with the splendid record of our glorious Empire” (E

85). Barker will frequently have her characters make this connection between war and

empire. It is W. H .R. Rivers, however, who Barker uses most prominently to first make

clear the connections between war and empire, and then to dismantle the tenets on which

they both stand. Throughout the trilogy, Rivers recalls his experiences as an ethnologist

doing the work of empire in colonized Melanesia; he constantly makes comparisons and

draws parallels between this work in Melanesia observing the societies of the people

there, and the work he is doing observing his shell-shocked soldier patients. In

Melanesia, he was an instrument of the imperial panopticon: like a good orientalist, he

observed, he documented, he wrote a book. In the war, as explained previously, his job is

to “heal” the soldiers so that they can return to the front—where they will probably be

killed. In both situations, he is the instrument of empire; thus, when he begins to

deconstruct the idea of the before the war/after the war divide, among others, Rivers can

see that this war is not an aberration, but an extension of the hegemonic order of empire.

In the trilogy, we see Rivers as a physician treating patients with psychological

disorders caused by the war. Rivers very much sees himself, however, as primarily an

ethnologist, claiming that “it was his Melanesia self he preferred” (E 235). His

recollections of his life and work in Melanesia are indeed touched with nostalgia;

however, as John Kirk writes: “Nostalgic memory, however, can be a response to a range

of complex needs and desires, and its articulation can construct a variety of values and

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ideals to contest dominant ideological positions” (606). This is precisely how Barker has

Rivers use his nostalgic memories of Melanesia; he views them in the context of empire

in general, and empire’s Great War in particular. Rivers uses the knowledge he gained

from his privileged experience in Melanesia to break down the theoretical foundations on

which empire rests. Rivers puts his “nostalgic memory” to use by making comparisons

between then and now, making connections such as the following: “The condensation

and displacement one encountered in the dreams of patients here—might not these

mechanisms also be at work in the myth and ritual of primitive people?” (R 186).

Rivers’s habit of continually making comparisons between the customs of the English

and the customs of the Melanesians has the pointed effect of unraveling the us/them

binary. If colonization is the left hand of empire, than the Great War is the right: he is

willing to look on both enterprises as empire’s work. For example, in The Ghost Road,

Rivers has left Craiglockhart Hospital and is working at the aptly named Empire Hospital

in London. His landlady’s son has died in the war, and whenever he passes through her

part of the house he sees, “the portrait of her dead son that hung above the mantelpiece,

with flowers beneath it and candlesticks on either side” (G 116). After noticing this

tribute,

Rivers thought about what he’d just seen: the portrait, the flowers. A shrine. Not fundamentally different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he’d gone with Njiru. The same hum animpulse at work. Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural recognition. (G 116-7)

This is not a difficulty for the reader, however, for Rivers will persistently recognize the

parallel.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. One of Rivers’s recollections is of a Melanesian ceremony in which he

participated, where the ghost of the recent dead was conjured back and given an

opportunity to “speak” through the conjurer. This particular ghost had asked questions,

and Rivers, looking back in hindsight “reflected that the questions the ghosts had asked

had all been questions the living people wanted answered” (G 211). At this point, Rivers

is once again treating a wounded Sassoon, who is seeing ghosts of his own. Of course,

Rivers makes the connection: “The ghosts were not an attempt at evasion, Rivers

thought, either by Siegfried or by the islanders. Rather, the questions became more

insistent, more powerful, for being projected into the mouths of the dead” (G 212). When

Sassoon bad been troubled by ghosts inRegeneration, Rivers had comforted him by

admitting to his own experience of hearing ghosts in a ceremony on the Solomon Islands

(R 188). When Rivers spends the night in the hospital so that he can be closer to the

ailing Sassoon, “for some reason the situation reminded him of sleeping on board the

deck of a tramp steamer traveling between the islands of Melanesia” (E 234). While

Rivers is visiting an ex-patient who is now living at the English seaside, he goes to a pub

and treats his evening there as ethnology field work. He gets an old man named Clegg to

speak with him about the local folklore, and concludes that “By closing time, he was

convinced Gegg was possibly the most unreliable informant he’d ever had. For sheer

imaginative flights of fancy none of the Melanesians came anywhere near him” (R 174).

In the midst of the war, Rivers begins doing ethnology studies of the imperial “us”.

One of the techniques Barker uses to emphasize this war/empire connection in the

Ghost Road is to alternate passages where Rivers is recollecting his stay in Melanesia

with Billy Prior’s first-person journal account of his return to the front. She does this

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. both with form and content For example, often Rivers and Prior will use the same

language to describe their experiences. Rivers looks at a young boy kidnapped by the

headhunters he is living with and studying, and notes that the boy “stood alone at the

center of the throng, his eyes like black bubbles that at any moment might burst” (G 191).

On the next page, Prior echoes Rivers’s language: “Two bubbles break here” (G 192).

Barker will shift from Billy Prior on board a ship on the way to France, writing, “People

playing cards below deck, but there’s quite a heave on the sea, and I’d rather be out here

watching it” (G 112), to Rivers’s recollecting that “On the Southern Cross, on the voyage

to Eddystone, he’d stood on deck, watching the pale green wake furrow the dark sea,

reluctant to exchange the slight breeze for the stuffy heat below deck” (G 118). Likewise,

she will also shift from Rivers’s being in a tent on the beach in Melanesia to Billy’s

similar tent accommodations in France.

The setting is not the only similarity emphasized. Describing how the British

treated the lands and peoples they colonized, Rivers can make it seem more horrible than

the propaganda stories of what the Germans did when they invaded Belgium. Barker also

highlights the irony that surfaces when making a comparison of the colonization of

Melanesia with the Great War. For example, the British have forbidden the headhunters

to hunt heads, so to speak. If they do so anyway, the colonizers react with “a gunboat off

the coast, villages on fire, trees cut down, crops destroyed, pigs killed. Screaming women

and children driven into the bush” (G 185). Rivers’s observation clearly makes this

appear like a great savagery in response to a small savagery. Rivers notes with irony that

the headhunters he lived with were “a people perishing from the absence of war” (G 207).

Then comes another journal entry from Prior, in which we see people perishing from the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. presence of war. The paradox of empire was that it was forcing men not to fight, while

simultaneously forcing other men to do just that

Rivers is critical of empire in its role both at home and abroad. In England he

thinks to himself that,

The sheer extent of the mess seemed to be forcing him into conflict with the authorities over a very wide range of issues.. .medical, military. Whatever. A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.(R 249)

And while in Melanesia he notes that “the impact of western culture had been

particularly devastating” (G 118). Rivers’s critique expands to include both genders.

He visits his ailing sister, Kath, and notes how since she was female, “the whole course

of Kath’s life had been constriction into a smaller and smaller space” while his own life

expanded (G 91). In Melanesia, Rivers had witnessed the near-death of a woman,

Emele. Emele’s husband had died, and the custom was that she had to sit wedged in a

stone “tomb” until a head was collected from another island. Only when that head was

obtained as a trophy could she move from her tomb. Since the British colonizers did

not allow heads to be hunted, Rivers worried that Emele would die. Later he dreams of

visiting Emele’s “tomb” and finding Kath there. The observations Rivers has made of

Melanesian society and the restrictions it places on women enable him to view English

society and its restrictions in the same critical manner.

Although Rivers is constantly evaluating and questioning the empire he

participates in, he does experience one realization in particular which seems to be an

epiphany of sorts and is mentioned in each book of the trilogy. This is a recollection of

a moment when he was conversing on the boat to Melanesia with some of the Islanders

by asking them standard ethnological questions, such as “what would you do with it if

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. you earned or found a guinea? Would you share it, and if so who would you share it

withV (R 242). After a while, the people he is questioning ask him the questions right

back. They find his own responses so strange that they begin to laugh, and Rivers

experiences this laughter as being extremely freeing. He says that “I felt as if a ton

weight had been lifted.... It was...the Great White God de-throned” and “suddenly I

saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all things, but thatthere was no measure”

(R 242). It is this realization, perhaps, that enables Rivers to be the character who

consistently sees the greater picture, for in The Ghost Road, Barker has Rivers again

reflect upon this incident. He thinks,

No bearded elderly white man looked down on them, endorsing one set of values and condemning the other. And with this realization, the whole frame of social and moral rules that keeps individuals imprisoned—and sane—collapsed, and for a moment he was in the same position as these drifting, dispossessed people. A condition of absolute freefall. (G 119-20)

The British Empire is in many ways built on its having been given moral authority to

colonize et al by such a “bearded elderly white man.” Rivers at this moment realizes that

the emperor is not wearing any clothes, that the emperor indeed could just as easily not be

wearing any clothes as be a “bearded elderly white man,” that Melanesian constructs were

as valid as English, that in both societies—English and Melanesian—“the same human

impulse [was] at work” (G 117). Rivers comments that he and his fellow ethnologist,

Hocart, did not bring weapons to Melanesia, not even a knife or a machete (G 232). Their

weapons, however, were the discourse of empire they were perhaps unwittingly carrying

with them. Hocart and Rivers were collecting knowledge which would be used by the

empire to continually classify the Melanesians as “other,” to strengthen “the idea of

European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cultures” (Said 7). The stupidities and horrors of World War I enable Rivers to continue

this line of questioning started years ago in Melanesia. War reminds Rivers of all that he

dislikes about empire.

In contrast to Dr. Yealland’s electroshock “therapy” treatment given to his mute

patient, Rivers often practices a form of therapy that has more in common with the

methods of Njiru, a “witch doctor” he followed and observed in Melanesia. Rivers uses

the treatment of empire’s “them” to cure the mental wounds inflicted on empire and war’s

“us”. In fact, Rivers learns a lot from Njiru—who both respects Rivers and rightfully

resents his invasive presence as an observer of his home and customs—and has a bonding

experience with him that is not unlike the bonding that the soldiers are experiencing (in

parallel fashion in The Ghost Road) at the front Njiru takes Rivers to the highest cave on

the island, a place where—according to tradition—spirits reside. Njiru and Rivers walk

farther into the caves than the rest of their party, and in the innermost recesses they end

up unwittingly disturbing a multitude of bats who rise up and fly past them in cloud after

cloud of black whirr. Rivers and Njiru grip hands during the exodus, and once silence

and stillness have returned, Rivers feels “not dazed, dazed was the wrong word. The

opposite of dazed. Almost as if a rind had been pared off naked, unshelled, lying in

contact with the earth” (G 167). He can see clearly in a way that he feels he has not done

before; after this moment he, more than before, can communicate with Njiru as an equal

and not only as colonizer to colonized, us to them. He and Njiru each experience in the

cave “a compression of identity into a single hard unassailable point: the point at which

no further compromise is possible, where nothing remains except pure naked self-

assertion. The right to be and to be as one is” (G 170). This point is Rivers’s war “front”,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and it confirms his epiphany regarding the absence of the “bearded elderly white man.” It

is the healing moment that will enable him to later heal others. Rivers’s experience as an

ethnologist will facilitate his skill as a psychoanalyst; both abilities make Rivers the right

character for Barker to use to “heal” the traumas of war and empire.

Empire at Home

In The Eye in the Door, the second novel of the trilogy, Billy Prior, on his way

back to active military duty, laughingly proclaims that “‘There’ll always be an England’”

(£ 276). But after reaching the end of this novel, one cannot help remaining unreassured

by Billy’s comment. For in The Eye in the Door, Barker portrays an England which is on

the verge of self-imploding. Barker continues to address the paradoxes of war and how

war is an extension of the tenets of empire, but she also makes sure to devote time to

exploring how the beginnings of the dissolution of the British Empire unfold in England

itself. In The Eye we see how everything is being tuned askew: the citizens become

“them” to the “us” of the state, and are constantly under watch in a panopticon manner,

sexuality is monitored almost as a political act, gender roles fluctuate, the patriarchal line

shows signs of great strain, and all of the state institutions reflect the particular, tense

characteristics of the Great War. So by the time Billy Prior remarks that ‘There’ll always

be an England,” Barker has made this seemingly simple statement complex by hinting at

the differences that a postimperial, post-war England will actually have to process and

incorporate.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The lower classes in England were often depicted as being as “other” as the

colonized. In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock notes that “urban explorers” would

write “travel books” about venturing into urban slums. She avers that “Drawing on

popular images of imperial travel, these urban explorers returned from their urban jaunts

with a primitive accumulation of ‘facts’ and ‘statistics’ about the ‘races’ living in their

midst,” and that “the analogy between slum and colony was tirelessly evoked, as was the

presiding figure of imperial discovery” (120). It is not surprising, then, that when the

empire is under siege, it increases its surveillance of the lower classes. Barker’s

character, Billy Prior, is from the working classes, and in The Eye in the Door, he sees

the effect that such increased surveillance has on, for example, Beattie Roper, a woman

who helped raise him. McClintock also explains in her book how the cult of domesticity

is a central component of imperialism. By focusing on domestic upheaval, then, Barker

is thus able to simultaneously suggest the beginnings of empire’s upheaval as well.

As mentioned previously, the minor character, Ruth Head, experiences a feeling

during the air raids that “the...crust of everything is starting to crack” (R 164). The war

is creating chasms that reveal the underbelly of the institutions of empire. It is not so

much that things are changing, as that there is a growing awareness of how things

functioned in the first place, and how this old status quo led naturally to the many

upheavals of the war. Barker demonstrates this by making frequent connections between

the war and the family unit For example, in The Eye, Billy Prior is put on home duty

because of his asthma. He begins to experience moments where he blanks out—only to

return to himself hours later with no knowledge of where he has been or what he has

done. He is still seeing Rivers as a therapist and together they work out that during these

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While trying to discover the origins for such a Jekyll/Hyde maneuver, Rivers traces this

behavior back to when Prior was a young boy and his father would come home drunk and

abuse his mother. Prior would get out of bed and sit on the top of the stairs, listening

helplessly to the abuse occurring down below. Prior reveals that first he would “‘sit on

the landing, going PIG PIG PIG PIG.’ He made as if to pound his fist” (E 247). Then, he

would stare at the reflection of light on the glass of the barometer hanging on the wall.

He would be hypnotized by this light, and would “go into the shine on the glass” (£ 248),

and become someone else. Rivers connects this to Prior’s reaction in France: “I think

you found out how to put yourself into a kind of trance. A dissociated state. And then in

France, under thatintolerable pressure, you rediscovered it” (E 248). The war in France,

then, works as a kind of extension of the “intolerable” patriarchal tensions that Prior had

to deal with as a young boy. As the officer in charge of gas drills in France, Prior has to

make sure his officers perform the steps correctly. In his journal, he writes regarding

these drills, “You’re settling down for the night.. .and wham! Rattles whirl, masks are

pulled on, arms and fists pumped, and then the muffled hollow shout GAS! GAS! GAS!”

(G 180). From muttering PIG PIG alone to leading the cries of GAS GAS: the situation

is really not that different Billy has to withdraw from both—into this double of

himself—in order to survive.

Having grown up in a working class community in Northern England, Billy will

often see the war in terms of an extension of the experiences he witnessed as a child. He

recalls at one point the beatings that the teachers at his school administered to the often

undeserving kids. He remembers how he thought, “Bastard .. .as Horton’s [the teacher’s]

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. arm swung. JYears later, after witnessing the brutalities of trench warfare, he still

thought: Bastard ’ (E 253). Compared to home life then, the war does not necessarily

have the ability to shock. A similar connection occurs in The Ghost Road when Billy is

writing of bow so often soldiers at the front have a peculiar expression on their faces

which he characterizes as a “rabbit-locked-up-with-a-stoat look” (G 173). He continues,

I’ve only ever seen that expression in one other place, and that was the Royces’ house. Family of four boys in the next street to us. Their father used to make them line up every night after he’d had a few pints, and lift their shirt-tails. Then he’d thrash them with a ruler on their bare bums. Every night without fail. One of them asked once, ’What’s it for, Dad?’ And he said, Tt’s for whatever you’ve done that you think you’ve got away with.’ But my God they could fight. (G 173-4)

Once again Barker is having Billy undermine the before/after divide of the war; the war’s

atrocities, although certainly horrible, are not new to the war the disenfranchised or

disempowered have already experienced horrors in everyday ordinary patriarchal life with

the naturalized violence of the family. Billy watched the Royce boys fight at home as he

would later watch soldiers fight at the front: a seamless transition.

While living in London and working at the Ministry of Munitions, Prior does note

that “All winter, it seemed to Prior, an increasingly frenetic quality had been creeping into

London life” (E 6). And after Haig releases his order stating that England will fight to the

death, Billy comments that “Whatever the effect the Order had on the morale of the army,

it had produced panic among civilians” (E 6). What Billy experienced as a poor child in

Northern England is now being felt by all Londoners, rich or poor. The war is evening

the distribution of empire’s more traumatic affects. Empire’s other side is bleeding into

home life, and now all of the institutions of the state seem to have an overt war

connection. When Billy visits a friend in prison he “was puzzled by a sense of familiarity

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that he couldn't place. Then he remembered. It was like the trenches. No Man’s Land

seen through a periscope, an apparently empty landscape which in fact held thousands of

men” (£ 30). As Rivers walks down the corridor of the hospital he thinks how “he never

failed to be depressed by the long narrow passage with its double row of brown doors and

the absence of natural light. ‘Like a trench without the sky’ had been one patient’s

description, and he was afraid it was only too accurate” (1? 17). War comes to London

and likewise, London also comes to the war. Billy sees this as he

walked along the pavements, looking at place-names: Marble Arch, Piccadilly, Charing Cross, Tottenham Court Road. All these places had trenches named after them. And, gradually, as he walked through the streets of the night city, that other city, the unimaginable labyrinth, grew around him, its sandbag walls bleached pale in the light of a flare, until some chance happening, a piece of paper blown across the pavement, a girl’s laugh, brought him back to a knowledge of where he was. (E 192-3)

He could be in either place; the border between home and the front has cracked and the

traffic of imagery now goes both ways: the “home-front” takes on a new meaning. On

another one of Billy’s night walks he has a similar experience. He is walking and then

falls into a deep hole, which he gradually realizes is a play trench: “Boys played here.

Street gangs. They must have been digging for months to get as deep as this. But then

probably the trench was years old, as old as the real trenches, perhaps. He clambered out,

over what he suspected was No Man’s Land, and there, sure enough, were the enemy

lines” (E 117). It has been easy to incorporate the war into childhood, for its framework

is familiar and homey.

To a certain extent the disarray of the war seems to fall along class lines. Having

experienced depravities in his childhood, Billy is often able to take some of the hom>rs of

the war in stride. Another character in the trilogy, the poet Wilfred Owen, is also from

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the working classes. Billy and Owen were at Craiglockhart hospital at the same time,

both suffering from shell shock, and are also back at the front together in The Ghost

Road. Billy observes Owen one night and writes, “I always felt, watching Owen at

Craiglockhart, that there was some kind of fantasy going on, that he was having the

public-school education he’d missed”(G 215). For someone with such a background,

there are elements to a wartime hospital that are a relief not only from the war but from

pre-war life as well. In contrast, the patrician Siegfried Sassoon has the opposite

experience at Craiglockhart. Rivers sees this and has the “fear that Craiglockhart had

done to Sassoon what the Somme and Arras had failed to do” (R 221). Approaching the

war with different experiences of the benefits of empire, Owen and Sassoon react in

opposite ways to empire’s upheaval.

With the war signaling the beginning of the dissolution of empire, those in power

begin to get paranoid. As a result of the war “cracking the surface,” suspicion and

surveillance increase: the citizens become “them” to the “us” of the state, and are

constantly under watch. Barker makes this panopticon aspect of empire under duress a

central theme of The Eye in the Door by constantly having her characters watch each

other and be observed by those that work for the state; everyone is a potential spy,

everyone a potential traitor. Nothing goes unseen. This watching begins with the prison

that Billy Prior visits to see Beattie Roper, a woman who acted as his mother many times

in his childhood when his own mother was sick. Beattie Roper is in jail as a protestor of

the war, and Billy visits her both as a friend and as a worker for the Ministry of

Munitions. When he walks into the prison, he sees everything in terms of eyes seeing

himself and others. The windows are “like little piggy eyes” (£ 28), the small-talk he

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. makes with the prison warden all concerns who can see whom and when. The prison

itself is a very model for Foucault’s panopticon: “The high walls were ringed with three

tiers of iron landings, studded by iron doors, linked by iron staircases. In the center of the

pit sat a wardress who, simply by looking up, could observe every door” (E 29). When

Billy is ushered into Beattie’s cell, she reveals to him that the worst part of prison is

feeling like she is being watched all the time. She gestures to the door closed behind him

and Billy sees an eye painted on it, with the pupil of the eye the peephole in the door (E

36). Billy cannot ignore the eye:

Facing it was intolerable, because you could never be sure if there were a human eye at the center of the painted eye. Sitting with his back to it was worse, since there’s nothing more alarming than being watched from behind. And when he sat sideways, he had the irritating impression of somebody perpetually trying to attract his attention. (£ 40)

This eye torments Billy for the rest of the book—long after he has left Beattie’s prison

cell. He begins to have nightmares about it which are far worse than the debilitating

nightmares about the front from which he suffered while being treated for shell shock

(E 58-9). Barker uses this notion of surveillance and the panopticon to convey that the

dissolution of empire has as stressful an effect on England’s home shores as it does at

the front in France.

The surveillance of and by the state has increased in general, but inThe Eye in

the Door one thing in particular that Barker portrays as being especially monitored is

the sexuality of its citizens. In a discussion on pacifism, Billy’s childhood friend, Mac,

makes the comment that “In the end moral and political truths have to be proved on the

body, because this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are”{E 112). In The

Eye, Barker is proving “on the body” empire’s increasing paranoia and need for control.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As empire begins to lose its grip abroad, it tries to gain more control over its own

citizens at home. The us becomes riddled with smaller divisions of us and them. The

shift to focusing on issues of sexuality is foreshadowed inRegeneration at a moment

when Rivers is having a tiresome dinner conversation at his club in London. He is

listening to the elderly Major Huntley rant on and on about the empire and what is

going wrong with it; Huntley is very concerned with matters of class and he says to

Rivers that “it was often the better type of woman who chose to limit the size of her

family, while her feckless sisters bred the Empire to destruction” (211). The elderly

Majors and Captains in The Eye seem to have taken this crazy concern one step further,

they become preoccupied with homosexual citizens who are not “breeding” at all.

Homosexuality, then, is portrayed not only as a “crime,” but as an unpatriotic act. As

Greg Harris comments: “The most public home-front battles were waged against

pacifists and homosexuals, whose actions were correlated by direct charge or innuendo

or both. Homosexuality and pacifism were punishable as crimes against country and

crimes against nature” (302). Sexual preference becomes conflated into an anti-war

stance and “country” becomes identified with nature.

Whereas Regeneration begins with Sassoon’s anti-war declaration, The Eye in

the Door begins with a tryst: Prior does not get lucky with Myra, a new acquaintance,

so he then propositions Charles Manning on a park bench. They return to Manning’s

large, boarded-up townhouse for the first of what will be many such rendezvous

throughout the book. InEye there are more of these moments, and discussion of the

issues surrounding them, than there is of the war. Barker even shows how Sassoon’s

attentions have switched. In Regeneration the conversations between Rivers and

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sassoon were always laden with not-so-subtle allusions to Sassoon’s sexuality. The

allusions remain indirect, because it seems as if Rivers is attracted to Sassoon, yet has

kept his own homosexual tendencies repressed. So Sassoon will say “‘My intimate

details disqualify me from military service’” and Rivers will smile and reply, “’I

know’” (R 70-71) and then later catch himself thinking of Sassoon’s physique

admiringly. Rivers’s main task, however, is to reconcile Sassoon with the necessary

disavowal of his anti-war declaration. In The Eye, Rivers once again becomes

Sassoon’s doctor when Sassoon gets a head wound. Now in this novel Sassoon’s

preoccupation is not so much the pros or cons of the war, but with his own desire to

stop living a double life. He tells Rivers that he wants to go to Sheffield to work in a

factory, “Because it’s close to Edward Carpenter” (£ 259), the author ofThe

Intermediate Sex. Sassoon protests UiWhy not? I did everything anybody wanted me to

do. Everything you wanted me to do. I gave in, I went back. Now why can’t I do

something that’s right for me?”’ (E 259); but Rivers sees this as “yet another hare

brained scheme, because this was another protest, smaller, more private, less hopeful,

than his public declaration had been, but still a protest”(E 260). Yet in the context of

The Eye, such a protest seems necessary; to the reader, if not to Rivers, it is obvious that

Sassoon’s “small protest” is a protest against the constrictions and surveillances with

which the book has been primarily concerned. Sassoon, here, is right on target.

There is another moment in Regeneration where Barker can be seen preparing

for what will be the main theme in The Eye. Rivers and Sassoon are once again having

a therapy discussion, and Rivers explains,

After all, in war, you’ve got this enormous emphasis on love between men—comradeship—and everybody approves. But at the same time

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. there’s always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? Well, one of the ways you make sure it’s the right kind is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other are. (R 204)

Rivers then goes on to mention the Pemberton Billing affair—a matter of great

importance in The Eye. For in The Eye, Charles Manning is being stalked by someone

who is aware of the double life that he leads with his wife and kids in the country and his

trysts with men in London. This stalker keeps sending Manning specially printed news

reports of the Pemberton Billing affair, a debacle in which it was said that an MP, Mr.

Billing himself, claimed “to know of the existence of a German Black Book containing

the names of47,000 eminent people whose private lives make their loyalty to their

country suspect”(R 204). Several articles purportedly written by Pemberton Billing

claimed that because of this list, the Germans would be able to control those on it who

were afraid of being exposed. A second article soon followed that, as Pat Barker explains

in an endnote, “suggested that the list of subscribers to a private performance of Oscar

Wilde’s Salome might contain many names of the 47,000. Maud Allan, who was to

dance the part of Salome, sued Pemberton Billing for libel, since the paragraph clearly

implied she was a lesbian” (E 279). At the trial, Pemberton Billing defended himself and

claimed that he did not write the articles nor make the accusations. It was discovered that

the actual writer was the star witness, a Captain Harold Spencer. Spencer, who ranted on

at the trial about “women who had hypertrophied and diseased clitorises and therefore

could be satisfied only by bull elephants”(E 279) was eventually declared insane.

The trial, however, had repercussions for many; Lord Alfred Douglas, of Oscar

Wilde fame, used the trial as an “opportunity of pursuing his personal dispute with Robert

Ross, Oscar Wilde’s devoted friend and literary executor, identifying him as ’the leader of

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The whole affair was prominently publicized and followed; Barker taps into this event by

having Manning rumored to be one of the 47,000. Manning even attends the showing of

Salome and has an encounter with the crazed Harold Spencer in the men’s room. Spencer

is mumbling about diseased clitorises and bull elephants and says suggestively to

Manning, “‘Didn’t I see you in the box with Robert Ross?”’ (E 81). “Looking him

straight in the eye and loading every word with significance” Manning replies U‘I am

from the Ministry of Munitions’” and walks out trembling (81). But being a part of the

empire power-structure will not necessarily save Manning, since the empire seems to be

crumbling within as well as without. Later in the novel, Manning will frequently see

Spencer across the street or leaning against lamp-posts, always watching. Spencer seems

symbolic of the old empire: he is losing his grip, and so he becomes preoccupied with

what he sees as the “deviations” of his fellow citizens. If war can “be understood as a

gendering activity, one that ritually marks the gender of all members of a society, whether

or not they are combatants” (Higonnet et al 4), then we can see Barker’s use of the

Pemberton Billing affair as a way of showing how homosexuality seemed, to the paranoid

powers that be, to represent a loss of control, since homosexuals could not be so simply

“marked”. The struggle all takes place “on the body” (E112).

Barker also signals that there is discord between those in power in empire’s

hierarchy and those who will eventually inherit this power. There is a breaking down

between fathers and sons and the passing of the baton between the two. W.H.R. Rivers is

the father figure to most characters in the trilogy, and it is a role that troubles him. For it

is Rivers who thinks that “A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or

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caught English society in the act of doing. At least twice in the trilogy Rivers thinks of

the story of Abraham and Isaac and how it is “The bargain...on which all patriarchal

societies are founded”(R 149). The problem, as Rivers sees it, is that “we’re breaking the

bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and

dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old

men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns” (R 149). After here

connecting the Abraham and Isaac story to the war, in The Ghost Road Rivers puts the

Abraham and Isaac story into more of an empire context. He compares it to a custom on

the island of Vao, where an illegitimate child would be raised by an adoptive family and

treated as a son, until one day, unwittingly, he would be sacrificed (G 103). Rivers

reflects that the Abraham story and the Vao story “represented the difference between

savagery and civilization, for in the [Abraham] scenario the voice of God is about to

forbid the sacrifice, and will be heeded” (G 104). But being in the midst of the Great

War, Rivers becomes uncertain about the reality of this difference. In his role as military

doctor, he feels too close to the Abraham whose hand is not staid and who thus carries out

the bloody sacrifice.

In the trilogy many of the men have issues with their fathers. The majority of

soldiers seem to have fathers who, like Burns’s father, are “a great believer in the war” (R

171) and thus cannot understand their sons’ reluctance, shell shock, etc. Rivers himself

often recollects the disagreements he had with his own father, a speech therapist who tried

to help Rivers with his stutter (R 155). Billy Prior—always the exception to every

rule—has a father who thought it was stupid of Billy to go and enlist; again different,

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228), Prior sees Rivers as being more like his mother (R 210). But it is also Billy, ever

attuned to the behind the scenes truths, whose subconscious creates a warrior double who,

because of being the Isaac sacrifice in his war experience, claims that “‘I was bora two

years ago. In a shell-hole in France. I have no father’” (£ 240). Just as Rivers feels guilt

over his Abraham role, Billy feels anger over his Isaac role. As Harris writes, “Barker

examines how patriarchal constructions of masculinity colonize men’s subjectivity in

ways that, especially in wartime, prove oppressive, repressive, and wholly brutal in their

effects on the male psyche” (303). Billy resists this colonization.

In contrast to the frequent splitting that occurred between fathers and sons, women

found the war experience to be generally unifying. In fact, Barker often emphasizes how

the genders were affected differently by the war, with frequent reversals in role. She has

Rivers think about how so much of the shell shock his patients suffered from could be

traced back to their immobility in the trenches; he comments that “the Great

Adventure—the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as

boys—consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had

promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’

passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known” (R 107-8). It

makes sense, then, that the soldiers’ shell shock was often so similar to female hysteria,

and Rivers makes the point that the two have to be linked: “Any explanation of war

neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and

danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in

peace” (R 222).

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Whereas, as Claire Tylee writes, “What men and women did share were the

cultural myths and the behavioral inhibitions of their society. They suffered equally from

the repression of their memories of traumatic experiences, and from a common

vulnerability to the myths of imperialism” (187), it is also true that men and women

experienced the war differently. Lizzie, a munitions worker in Regeneration, comments

that when war was declared, as far as she was concerned, “Peace broke out” because her

abusive husband went off to France (110). The division the war created between men and

women is summarized in a conversation Prior has with his friend, Hettie Roper. Hettie

says that her friend pointed out during the excitement of an air-raid that ‘Tor women, this

is the first day in the history of the world,” and Prior replies, “And the last for a lot of

men” (£ 101). Barker, of course, is not the first to make this observation. Many critics

have written about how war was often empowering for women. Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar claim that this is why there was often tension between the men at war and the

women at home: “Ultimately, this barely veiled hostility between the front and the home

front, along with the exuberance of the women workers who had succeeded to (and in)

men’s places, suggested that the most crucial rule the war had overturned was the rule of

patrilineal succession, the founding law of patriarchal society itself’ (279-80). Whereas

not going so far as to say that these rules were “overturned” by the war, Gail Braybon and

Penny Summerfield aver that “Both wars put conventional views about sex roles under

strain. Women were after all working long hours next to men, learning new jobs, and

earning better wages than they had before (1). They also assert that “For many women,

the war offered the chance to escape—from home, or from hated jobs” (58). And, “As

David Mitchell observes, ‘when the time came for demobilization,’ many women ‘wept at

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the ending of what they now saw as the happiest and most purposeful days of their lives’”

(Gilbert 204). Anne McClintock contends that “The metaphoric depiction of social

hierarchy as natural and familial—the ‘national family,’ the global ‘family of nations,’ the

colony as a ‘family of black children ruled over by a white father’—depended in this way

on the prior naturalizing of the social subordination of women and children within the

domestic sphere” (358). By showing the women with newfound power, Barker indicates

that the power of the old order is collapsing.

Barker has Billy Prior recognize that things have changed between men and

women. When Prior first meets Sarah Lumb, who will eventually become his fiancde, he

is momentarily confused by her confidence: “He didn’t know what to make of her, but

then he was out of touch with women. They seemed to have changed so much during the

war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk

into a smaller and smaller space” (R 90). Rivers will later echo these words when he

thinks of how his sister’s life before the war had been a “constriction into a smaller and

smaller space” while his own life expanded” (G 91). The war has overturned this

discrepancy. When Prior goes on leave back home to the North of England, he notices

how the women have changed there as well. Whereas before the women would spend

their evenings on the front stoops, now “Prior saw deserted doorsteps. Women were out

and about, but walking purposefully, as if they had somewhere to go” (£ 95). Not only

are these women going out, but they are going to what formally had been a man’s bastion:

the pub. Prior sees “two married women going out for a drink together. Unheard of.

And in his father’s pub too”(E 96). The new role women have achieved gains the status

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of myth, too, when a rumor begins circulating that zeppelins were piloted by women (R

222); during wartime, at least, there are no limits to what women can do.

Of course, this fact had many people worried. Billy’s dad is convinced that where

women are concerned “This war’s the Trojan horse, only they’re all too so-and-soing daft

to see it” (E 93); he is convinced that when the war ends, the women will not be returning

to their domestic lives. Billy, too, has moments where he seems to agree with his father,

noting that “nothing puts a woman in her place more effectively than a chivalrous gesture

performed in a certain manner” (£ 27). Sarah Lumb’s mother also resists the new

changes; she thinks that “in her world, men loved women as the fox loves the hare. And

women loved men as the tapeworm loves the gut” (R 195). Barker also makes it clear

that despite some upheaval, the old-boy network was in many ways still going strong.

For example, Billy’s friend Beattie Roper is in jail for being pro-peace. As she says, “T

told the truth in court. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ She laughed.

‘Bloody fatal, that was’” (E 33). For doing so, Beattie is now languishing and sick in a

prison cell; this stands in marked comparison to Regeneration's Sassoon, who had friends

and colleagues in high places bending over backwards to make sure that he did not go to

jail for expressing the same beliefs as Beattie. In Regeneration, too, we witness Sarah’s

friend Lizzie being berated by a doctor for wanting an abortion; it is left up to Beattie in

The Eye in the Door to point out that “You know, killing a baby when its mother’s two

months gone, that’s a terrible crime. But wait twenty years and blow the same kid’s head

off, that’s all right” ( E 102). Changes are occurring—albeit slowly—amongst the genders

in the British Empire’s home base; signs are evident of the dissolution of the old order.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At the end of The Ghost Road, Barker has Rivers muse, “There was a teal danger,

he thought, that in the end the stories would become one story, the voices blend into a

single cry of pain” (G 229). Rivers, however, will not let this danger come to pass.

When Hallet, the soldier who Billy Prior rescued, dies in Rivers’s hospital ward, he dies

moaning “shotvarfet” which Rivers is able to translate as “It’s not worth it” (G 274). The

other patients join in with the chant, creating a horrible tension and noise: “Rivers was

aware of a pressure building in his own throat as that single cry from the patients went on

and on. He could not afterwards be sure that he had succeeded in keeping silent, or

whether he too had joined in” (G 274-5). Rivers, however does not let this voice remain

the single voice of war. As he slumps exhausted into a chair, he sees a vision of Njiru, his

Melanesian counterpart. Through Njiru, “advancing down the ward of the Empire

Hospital,” Rivers is once again able to indict empire along with war. With Rivers’s help,

Barker will lay the ghosts of empire and war to rest. Njiru chants, “ There is an end o f

men, an end of chiefs, an end o f chieftains' wives, an end o f chiefs children” (G 276):

and so there is also an end of empire.

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“THE GREAT ADVENTURE INTO NOWHERE”: POSTIMPERIAL TRAUMA AND THE NEW PASSAGE EAST IN MARGARET DRABBLE’S THE GATES OF IVORY

“The nation dies, says Mme Akrun. It is sad, but what can one do? One must

learn to begin again” (335). So proclaims a character in The Gases o f Ivory, the third

volume of Margaret Drabble’s trilogy. Mme Akrun makes this statement from a refugee

camp across the border of Kampuchea: almost everyone she knew in her pre-Khmer

Rouge life has been murdered, including her husband; her eldest son disappeared years

ago; a daughter was traumatized into imbecility by her refugee experience; and she has

had to raise her three remaining children in the no-man’s-land of the camps.

Understandably, Mme Akrun wants to move on. For years Mme Akrun tried to find

Mitra, her missing son. She told the story of the night he disappeared to anyone who

would listen, moving one English photo-journalist who heard her appeal to take an

award-winning picture of her that would become the front page of a Kampuchean

Refugee Aid brochure. When the above statement is made, however, Mme Akrun has

accepted the disintegration of her country and the rearrangement of her life. She does not

want to analyze it or even moum it: again, she wants to move on.

Liz Headleand, an Englishwoman in her fifties who has come to the camps on a

search of her own, cannot understand this change in Mme Akrun. Drabble muses:

“Something has snapped in Mme Akrun, or time has healed her. How can Liz know

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which? Is it the same thing? She cannot read this woman” (336). Liz is the main

character of the trilogy, and Mme Akrun’s seeming nonchalance regarding the “death” of

her country is juxtaposed directly against the feelings of Liz—and her two long-time

college friends, Alix and Esther—about England’s twentieth-century diminishmenL In

all three novels, Liz, Alix, and Esther are constantly confronted with the consequences of

England’s imperial decline; in fact, the rise and fall of empire seems something that

cannot be escaped or passed by. Alix melodramatically thinks, “Why must it go on for

ever and ever, death and destruction, tragic empire after tragic empire, Tamburlaine,

Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Stars and Stripes planted upon Mars as the imperial

contamination spreads like a cancer through interstellar space?” (438). In Drabble’s

London, the remains of empire are coliseum-sized: Liz, Alix, and Esther have to

incorporate this nostalgia and shame for empire into their eveiyday lives, as well as

figure out how to make some kind of a habitable reconciliation with it.

Margaret Drabblehas figured this out. InThe Radiant Way and A Natural

Curiosity she portrays 1980’s England with all its postimperial pitfalls and quandaries:

her characters question how to come to terms with their—and England’s—new place in

the world order. And in The Gates o f Ivory, her characters begin to answer these

questions, which lead to the questions of this dissertation: If it is generally accepted that

in the age of imperialism novels produced empire, what do they now, in this historical

moment, produce in its stead? What new form of the power/knowledge connection does

“Orientalism,” for instance, serve in the aftermath of empire? How do shame and

nostalgia for empire and the trauma of empire’s dissolution coexist in the postimperial,

postwar novel?

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Curiously, Drabble’s critics have tended to miss these issues in her texts. When

any sort of acknowledgment is made that empire is a subject Drabble explores, it is done

so in a rather anachronistic manner. For example, even the blurb on the back ofThe

Gates o f Ivory describes the novel as if it were written sixty or so years ago as a

companion to the novels of Conrad and Forster. Drabble, it claims, is “juxtaposing the

acutely observed London society of her earlier novels with the alien and terror-ridden

landscapes of the East....” This, I claim, is precisely what Drabble does not do: her

trilogy portrays a world where the old East/West dichotomy is no longer the order of

things; she examines the effect that the dissolution of empire has had on everyday life in

England, and establishes how literature plays a central role in both bandaging and

assuaging this trauma.

The connection between empire and the novel has been firmly established. For

instance, the significance of empire to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novel has

been thoroughly researched and analyzed, with studies such as Edward Said’s

Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism leading the way; Said’s reading of Jane

Austen’sMansfield Park, for example, in which he establishes how Austen

“synchronizes domestic with international authority,” shows how the pervasive, if

understated imperialist references in a nineteenth-century novel are crucial to the creation

and depiction of a seemingly provincial England (87). Similarly, critics such as Simon

Gikandi have shown how the “moment of English modernism, in spite of a certain

canonical insistence on its ahistorical and bermetical character, was generated by a crisis

of belief in the efficacy of colonialism, its culture, and its dominant terms” (161).

Gikandi writes that “modernist narratives are about failure.. .but they also derive their

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codependency that exists between empire and the modernist text The postmodern

narrative was not supposed to share these same concerns. More recently, however, the

“divide” between modernist and postmodern texts has been questioned. In his

introduction toNationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, Seamus Deane writes that to

accept without question “the postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism” is “surely to pass

from one kind of colonizing experience into another” and is itself a kind of “concealed

imperialism” (19); and in her study of the primitive in modernist texts, Marianna

Torgovnick cautions that “We have become accustomed to seeing modernism and

postmodernism as opposed terms marking differences in tone, attitude, and forms of

economic and social life between the first and second halves of the twentieth century.

Yet with regard to views of the primitive, more similarities exist than we are used to

acknowledging” (9). I will argue that the same holds true “with regard to views” of

empire.

The pos/colonial status of such texts as Margaret Drabble’sThe Gates o f Ivory

tends to be given the benefit of the doubt; with such extensive studies written on the

integral role empire has played in literature of previous eras, however, it seems incredible

and improbable that empire—so intertwined with the novel form—could just dissolve

after World War II and immediately be disassociated from literature. Again I will turn to

Simon Gikandi who, in his Maps ofEnglishness, I think best describes how the

contemporary cultural identity crises experienced by the English in the past two decades

can be traced back to thedismantling of the culture of colonialism. InMaps o f

Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, Gikandi writes of how in the

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forums and books analyzing the state of the nation; after researching this theme and its

origins, he came to the conclusion that “the crisis of Englishness in the present period is

symptomatic of the incomplete project of colonialism, for it calls attention to the fate of

powerful cultural categories forced—by decolonization and the demise of empire—to

exist outside the historical conditions that made them possible” (9). To prove his point,

he studied and wrote about identity issues in texts from those by Carlyle and Mill to

nineteenth-century travel writing to the specific problems facing modernist writers such

as Greene and Conrad. Using such texts to answer a question about the present day is

logical, claims Gikandi, because “it is still within the incomplete colonial project that the

postcolonial moment must be located and interrogated” (49).

Gikandi continues on to make the point that whereas the crisis of colonialism was

anxiety-producing for modernist writers, this same crisis “presented postcolonial writers

with a productive cultural space” which he terms the “postimperial aporia”—a moment

between the end of colonization and the beginning of an (often equally stifling)

nationalism (194). He uses the writings of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Joan

Riley to show how this postimperial aporia can be used positively: the migrant’s

potential empowerment by being of several worlds, and being able to draw upon varying

myths of origin, are two such creative moments. It is crucial to note here, however, that

at this point Gikandi is looking to narratives from the “decolonized polis” and by migrant

writers in the “English metropolis” for these productive “new stories of Englishness”

(xiii). He asks and answers the central question, “How do postcolonial writers represent

identity when the empire is dead but the long shadow cast by the culture of colonialism

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with and admire Gikandi’s thesis and argument; however, I think that by focusing

exclusively on writers like Rushdie, Kureishi and Riley—writers from the former

colonies or diasporic writers—Gikandi perpetuates the notion that England and white

English writers can be disassociated from the postcolonial situation. This leads me to

ask: why is it that postcolonial readings are immediately done of a Rushdie book situated

in London—his London must contain imperial referents—and not of a Drabble book

situated in the same London? What does it mean that Drabble is “allowed” to be past

empire?

Postcolonial readings have of course been done of many twentieth-century British

novels: the amount written about the works of some authors, even, has escalated into a

comfortable industry. Such attention is usually given, however, to authors who write

overtly about empire—like Paul Scott—or authors who have overt connections to

empire—like, as mentioned above, Salman Rushdie. In his book on marxism and the

colonial and postcolonial novel, Colonial Power, Colonial Texts, Keith Booker aptly

writes that the

view of 20th-century history as the story of the decline and fall of the empire often shows up in British literature as a desire to awaken from the nightmare of history. This ambivalence (even horror) toward history can best be seen in a postcolonial work like Paul Scott’sRaj Quartet, which centers on great historical events like World War II and the end of the Raj but ultimately seems to challenge the very notion of historical change (129).

No doubt: but as Said has shown with his reading of Austen’sMansfield Park, and as

critics like Jenny Sharpe have explained with readings of Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the

seemingly insular, “hometurf ’ novels are often revealed to have an empire underbelly.

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English text such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the same can be said of the novels

of Margaret Drabble.

There seems to be a history of critics classifying Drabble’s writing as having

different aims from those of her postcolonial and postmodern peers. For example, in a

book that aims to define and study the postmodern novel, Patricia Waugh argues that

Drabble eschewed most stereotypical postmodern novel characteristics and instead

returned “to the traditional preoccupations of the psychological and domestic novel, but

self-consciously from the perspective of writing as a woman” (24). Perhaps Drabble

would agree with this, but in a speech she gave to the American Academy of Arts and

Letters in May of 1997, she interestingly classified her writing and its goals as being

similar to that of Salman Rushdie. Complaining first about the new abundance of

nostalgic, historical novels, she queried, “But who, one begins to wonder, is tackling the

present? Have we abandoned it, despaired of it?” (Threepenny 23). She went on to

champion Rushdie, claiming that “Rushdie grapples both with the historical and the

contemporary.... He confronts the contemporary world and the urban world with a

courage and an invention that outrun those who pursue him. So it can be done” (23).

Drabble then briefly outlined the novel she was working on(The Peppered Moth), with

its plot overtly Rushdiesque in scope. I believe that Drabble’s most recent novels—the

trilogy in particular—already share many components of a Rushdie novel: they too are

“historical and contemporary” and deal with the empire as it is now—defunct—and not

as it was in its “glory days”. So when Drabble concluded that “The past can move us into

the future, in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgic retreat into the pastoral” (23), I

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how.

Such an explanation must begin with a certain trope that appears continually in

English cultural commentary from the 1980’s on: a trope of malaise, ennui, and general

illness. I have already catalogued these references in the introduction, but they bear

repeating. Writing about the return of the British Raj in the Thatcherite 1980’s, Salman

Rushdie, in his essay “Outside the Whale,” declares that “the refurbishment of the

Empire’s tarnished image is under way,” that many British “turn their eyes nostalgically

to the lost hour of their precedence” and that “Britain is in danger of entering a condition

of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and to posture like a great

power while, in fact, its power diminishes every year” (my italics) (91-2). In a similar

fashion, this chapter’s favorite critic, Simon Gikandi, asks in his Maps of Englishness:

“And how are we to make use of a past whose practical and theoretical consequences

were often negative and destructive—a past that casts such a long shadow over our

present moment that many of us still reel from its trauma?” (21). Christopher Lane

debates whether or not “Britain’s situation would appear closer to melancholia than

mourning” (232); Benedict Anderson points out that a nation’s narratives are affected by

“all profound changes in consciousness, [which] by their very nature, bring with them

characteristic amnesias” (204); Edward Said asserts that “We must take stock of the

nostalgia for empire” (Culture and Imperialism 12); and Fredric Jameson has claimed

that imperialism appears in Western literature as “formal symptoms” (64). While for

some, the dissolution of the British Empire enabled a creative “postimperial aporia,” for

others empire’s dissolution had the opposite effect. Again, this is not a call to pity for the

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empire’s demise as a trauma, because of the ensuing and parallel demise of the traditional

English cultural identity, goes a long way towards explaining such recurrent references of

malaise and dis-ease.

In her book, Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth examines Freud’s theory of

“traumatic neurosis,” writing that it is “the unwitting reenactment of an event that one

cannot simply leave behind” (2). If, as Gikandi claims, English identity or “Englishness”

“had been produced by a continuous conflict between the center and its Celtic and

colonial peripheries” (xvii) then it can be assumed that the loss of the use of these

peripheries as mirrors which reflected back a certain perception of England and the

English must have profoundly affected the construction of cultural identity. By including

so many references to empire and how England has changed because of empire’s

dissolution in her trilogy, Drabble addresses what these constant illness references are

indicative of: the cultural need to re-live the trauma of the end of empire as a working

out of the question central to a traumatic neurosis—namely, “what does it mean to

survive?” (Caruth 60). InThe Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and especially in The

Gates of Ivory, Drabble addresses just what it means to “survive” empire and its

dissolution, and portrays a new, postimperial, world order.

If the dissolution of the British Empire can be said to be experienced by the

(colonizing) culture at large as a trauma, then to explain why it is logical to search for the

reverberations of this dissolution in novels written fifty to sixty years after the event, I

will turn again to Cathy Caruth and her Unclaimed Experiences. Caruth, referencing

Freud, claims that ‘Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent

event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may

take the form of belatedness” (91-2). In chapter three, I have shown how this concept

intersects with the sudden popularity of World War I novels, films, and histories in

general, and Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy in particular. The same claims can be

made regarding cultural trauma and the “Raj Revival” of the Thatcherite 80’s, as well as

how empire is reflected and used by seemingly “domestic” contemporary novelists like

Margaret Drabble. In her essay, “Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work,” Irene

Kacandes reminds us that “literary texts can be about trauma.... But texts can also

‘perform’ trauma, in the sense that they can ‘fail’ to tell the story, by eliding, repeating,

and fragmenting components of the story” (56). And, I would continue, literary critics

can “perform trauma” by then insisting on interpreting a text in a certain way. It is only

recently that critics have begun to read Drabble’s novels as other than “psychological”

and “domestic”. Roberta Rubenstein has written of how “Margaret Drabble has

noticeably shifted her emphasis from an earlier concentration on the moral and domestic

dilemmas of her female characters to narratives that reflect—and reflect upon—a

problematic, violent, and arbitrary universe” (136); and Pamela Bromberg has pointed

out that “By decentering and fragmenting her characters’ life stories Drabble resists the

ideologies inscribed in what could have been constructed as stories of falling in or out of

love, of marrying and divorcing, or stories of education, growth, and success or failure”

(17). Still, most critics have ignored how much of Drabble’s portrayal of the new

“arbitrary universe” is a specifically postimperial portrayal. Drabble tries not to “fail” to

tell the story of empire’s demise and its effect on English social culture. In the Author’s

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sequel toThe Radiant Way, and at the end of the note states that “At the moment of

writing this, I intend to write a third but very different volume which will follow the

adventures of Stephen Cox in Kampuchea.” I do not think The Gates o f Ivory is as

different from the first two books as Drabble might claim: it just continues overtly about

matters of empire’s demise, with much of its action taking place in the East, whereas the

first two novels are more covertly about empire in that they concentrate on the impact the

end of empire has had and does have on England’s social culture. Ernst Van Alphen

writes that “Memory is not something we have, but something we produce as individuals

sharing a culture. Memory is, then, the mutually constitutive interaction between the

past and present, shared as culture but acted out by each of us as an individual” (37).

Drabble has the individual characters ofThe Gates o f Ivory—together with her narrative

voice of the text itself—react to and confront empire’s decline in ways that serve as a

specific response to how empire has been represented in and produced by novels written

throughout the long history of British imperialism. She confronts the topic on three of

the most firmly entrenched literature/empire fronts: trauma and war, the symbolic and

metaphorical use of women, and the complicit role of literature, itself.

Tranma

“‘Britain is poor country,’she informs him. ‘Post-industrial country. You import from Japan, from Korea, from Thailand. You no more manufacturing. You cooling, we heating. You protectionist now. You senile now. ’” — Miss Pomtip

In The Gates o f Ivory, the characters on occasion will go to have a pint in a pub

called the Spoils of War (30). Even in moments of leisure, it seems, there is to be no

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. escape from the hauntings of empire’s ghosts. Drabble continuously returns to what in

the eighties and nineties seems to be always waiting around the comer the realization of

the demise of Britain’s imperial identity and the necessity of forming a new, postimperial

English identity. In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud writes of how a person

suffering from a traumatic neurosis experiences a “compulsion to repeat” and will

continually re-experience the trauma, often in dreams and hallucinations. The traumatic

neurosis forms, in part, as a result of not being prepared for the trauma, and thus not

having built up the requisite anxiety which “protects its subject against fright and so

against fright neuroses” (11). Such explanations can be applied to why in the last two

decades of the twentieth century, empire’s demise has become a troubling substitute for

the use of the 1857 Mutiny at the beginning of the century: where the Mutiny was an

imperialist rallying myth, the demise of empire has become a tolling bell. It is a

culturally traumatic moment that is compulsively returned to in order to build up the

anxiety that will eventually serve as a passage to a state of acceptance and acclimation to

postimperial life. Margaret Drabble addresses this trauma in intricate ways inThe Gates

o f Ivory by having the trauma within the text interact with the trauma o f the text I will

begin with an explication of the trauma within.

The new world order that Drabble portrays in her novel can best be explained

using the terms and framework Aijun Appadurai sets forth in his essay, “Disjuncture and

Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Appadurai argues that the “new global

cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which

cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models...” (6).

Instead of the old model of nation states with their distinct national cultures, and instead

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the self/other, us/them dichotomies, he describes a new order made up of a series of

porous and inter-related “-scapes”; then, global interactions “occur in and through the

growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and

ideoscapes” (11). Appadurai emphasizes that “the global relationship between

ethnoscapes, technoscapes and finanscapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly

unpredictable” (8); citizens of the twentieth century are going to have to discover new

ways to cope with such disjunctures, and inThe Gates o f Ivory, Drabble frequently has

her characters do just that

Adjusting to and coping with the new disjunctures of the global cultural economy

is something Drabble’s characters are shown doing on both a small and a large scale. For

instance, she often has them notice how their cultural landscape has changed; her

characters are consciously registering such changes. While eating at a restaurant, Liz

Headleand looks out the window and rather drowsily sees “the enshrined Campden Hill

dignitaries to the west, the Bayswater backwaters to the east: the brutal and grand

dwellings of Czech and Soviet and Indian diplomats: the Peking Ducks and Pizza

Parlours of Queensway...” (14). London now does more than allow the other within it;

Drabble portrays it as a place transformed. A new character, Hattie Osborne, who

directly addresses the reader and speaks in the first person, mentions how in the

correspondences of the Cambodia-traveling Stephen Cox, she is referred to by her initials

as “HO”, which is sometimes confusing, since this is also how Stephen refers to Ho Chi

Minh City. The packet from Stephen Cox around which the novel centers is mailed to

Liz with Kampuchean stamps that commemorate the wedding of Charles and Diana—“A

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. slightly oriental Prince Charles and Princess Di” (116). Liz and her friends are becoming

inured to such an amalgam of cultures.

However, England’s postimperial status and the new global cultural economy are

topics that Drabble’s characters always return to: the scab will itch. For example, Liz’s

friend, Alix Bowen, who in this book is preoccupied with her husband’s cancer, often

includes issues of empire in her everyday musings. Rubenstein claims that “Through

Alix Bowen, Drabble raises complex questions about competing social and political

forces in contemporary British life and about the inner forces of the individual

personality” (101), yet in The Gates o f Ivory the questions Drabble raises through Alix

often concern empire. In a melancholy moment of reflection on London Bridge, Alix’s

train of thought begins with her husband’s illness and gradually travels to the figurative

“Gates of Empire at Heathrow” (294). She then thinks of the chain of peoples who have

reflectively looked at the Thames, “the No-people, the Celts, the Belgae, the Romans, the

Angles, the Saxons, the Normans, the Huguenots, the Dutch potters, the refugees from

the pogroms of Russia and Poland, the survivors of the Final Solution, the Hungarians,

the Turks, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the West Indians, the Africans, the Cypriots, the

Vietnamese, the Cambodians” (293-4). That there has been a history of a multitude of

peoples in London reassures Alix about the inhabitants of London today; perhaps the

present is not so completely divorced from the past When Drabble changes the scene,

she leaves Alix on this bridge thinking of Rushdie and the Ayatollah’s fatwa—a moment

where postimperial England rightly came to the defense of “the other within.” Alix’s

feelings about contemporary England vacillate, but that a character’s thoughts can elide

smoothly from personal trauma to aspects of England’s postimperial condition reveals an

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. uneasiness about the repercussions of this new condition. Drabble uses the personal

trauma—which is easily recognizable as trauma—to register the larger trauma of the

postimperial condition.